3. Imagining in Gupta-Vrindavan: Experiencing the Self and Emotions in the Mind-Heart Landscape

Abstract

The exact moment when the field becomes engraved in the anthropologist’s flesh and dream escapes her. It can only be recalled in reactions, much later. On a fortunate day in Cambridge, I woke up before dawn. Sipping my morning tea I looked out at the sky. The golden sun had just started to brighten the cloud lines. I could immediately “see” that Radha was being woken up by her friends after her nocturnal tryst with Krishna in a Vrindavan forest and quickly sent back home, lest her allnight absence from the house be discovered by her in-laws.1 But before I could enjoy the sight of their waking embraces, my objective self kicked in. I realized I was imagining. Yet, just as I was beginning to feel distressed by the clash between professional objectivity and an enraptured spiritual self, I remembered what a babaji had told me: “Only when one is blessed with divine grace are one’s subtle senses able to feel Vrindavan lilas in the manas [mind-heart]. This is not to be confused with kolpona [unreal]. It is as true as perception. The manas gupta-Vrindavan has manifested the simultaneous events of Vrindavan, right there and right then.” While the previous chapter dealt with the visible, historicized, articulated and publicly accessible face of Bengal-Vaishnavism in discussing debates on Nadia’s geography, here I document another dimension of the experience of place: the practices of an imaginative landscape in the interiorized affective space of the mind. I analyze the key devotional chapter 3