Song of the Sweet Lord

Document Type

Research Article

Abstract

A personal epiphany led me to start researching Krishna, devotion traditions in northern India, which often go under the term Bhakti. The Bhagavad Gita speaks of three elements of the union with god—sat, cit, ananda—truth, consciousness, bliss. In Mathura/Vrindavan, the sacred geography of Krishna worship in northern India, I started to learn to experience joy (some version of ananda) at intuiting Krishna’s presence. This was an act of intellectual capacity as well as a bodily intuition. The concomitant act of conducting research, therefore, was complicated by this individual experience of extreme joy or ananda in the presence of the Godhead. I am, now, simultaneously trying to find a way to practice bhakti in my inner life while conducting ethnography about the everyday life of Bhakti. This poem travels through the split subjectivity of the ethnographer as they try to gather “data” on the lives of worship while consuming the presence of the Godhead as a devotee. I become split between a mystic and a scholar, even as I meet mystics while being a scholar. What does ethnographic research look like when one is simultaneously engaging in doing what one is mandated to watch others doing? What happens when the doing and watching diverge in consequence? In its actual, literal doing, “participant observation” then hits upon a real conundrum: whether to immerse in the doing or the watching, and the inevitable conclusion that the two can’t happen simultaneously. If the two must diverge, I suspect they will deliver two very different ethnographies. This conundrum is mapped onto the simultaneous habitation of the selves of research and devotion. This poem grows out of such simultaneous habitation. The contradictions of this semi-autoethnographic journey force themselves out in poetic form. The Lord speaks, I believe, in verse, on the rare occasions when he chooses to step out of silence.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1111/anhu.12383

Publication Date

3-30-2022

Journal

Anthropology and Humanism

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