Letter from the Editor

Abstract

As I write these words, I am in a bar in the middle of New Delhi, India. There’s chicken pakora on the plate at my elbow. Some shock-green, mint chutney in a little bowl. There’s cricket on the TV. Sachin Tendulkar is waving at the camera from his retired place in the stands. The major metro stop from which I disembarked a half hour back is at Rajiv Chowk, named for one of India’s prime ministers, who was assassinated in 1991. Just outside, I spent several minutes listening to a man who identified himself as Bhagat Singh explain how his shop helps regional craftspersons.1 At this moment, the bar’s soundtrack is Maren Morris’s “My Church.”“Can I get a hallelujah?” Morris wails.I don’t know this song. I’m not a country music fan. The “hallelujah” and “amen” in the chorus caught my attention, in this space where I would expect “Tu Cheez Badi Hai Mast Mast” or “Mundian To Bach Ke.” Almost as quickly as I realize what I’m hearing, I don’t mind saying, I find myself a little choked up. Just a little.Some of the lyrics from Morris’s tune, for those who, like me, don’t know them:Can I get a hallelujah?Can I get an amen?Feels like the Holy Ghost running through yaWhen I play the highway FMI find my soul revivalSinging every single verseYeah, I guess that’s my church2I’ve invested at least half a career, at this point, in studying the ways in which religion emerges and flows through circumstances and still the irruption of religion can strike me as marvelously strange. Morris finds it, her song says, in music from her car stereo. As she courses down the road, Johnny Cash and Hank Williams sanctify her moment, charge it with a quality that her words can’t avoid casting as religious. It’s “holy redemption,” she says, or, rather, sings—the styled noise coming out of her car’s speakers and the call to sing with it that she can’t resist.I’m at the very, very end of eight months in northern India. Four days from the moment of this sentence’s composition, I will get on a Korean Air flight for the USA via Seoul. Assuming that the legendary fog that falls on Delhi in January is light enough that the plane can take off, I’ll be back in the USA the day after that. Presumably, I’ve been doing research, these many months. I have a research topic, certainly. And I had some research plans. But plans are contingent on what fog will allow.A few months back, I was on a beach in Mumbai as giant Ganesha figures were carried into the water, pushed way out to sea, and swamped. I was on Chandni Chowk in a dense crowd of thousands of others on India’s Independence Day. I walked alongside an all-day Rath Yatra procession through Ahmedabad and I jostled with the dense crowd carrying taziyeh up into Jor Bagh Karbala in Delhi. I watched days of Ramlila performances, one daily episode after another, at several different locations in Delhi and in Varanasi, and I crashed a few Durga Pujas in Chittaranjan Park. I was present for a stupendous, noisy abhishek in Vrindavan. I saw a cosplay competition. Of course, I passed beside crowds of tourists from India and from everyplace else, clicking selfies in front of monuments. I did some aerial yoga. I hung out with communists doing street theatre. I went scuba diving.It wouldn’t be false to say—and I hope this does not sound as flippant as it sounds—that I’ve been playing for eight months.It’s a very serious sort of work, this play that we do, in churches, in temples, on beaches, in old cars on old highways, in front of monuments, on stages, and in bars in New Delhi. Morris calls her singing church an escape from a heavy world, and I’ve no right to say it’s not. But I might suggest that the singing, the praying, the processing, the swamping, even the silk swinging and the diving create the wonderful part of Morris’s wonderful, heavy world.Anyway, in 2022, I spent a lot of time among people earnestly engaged in playing the world to life.Yeah, I guess that’s my church.