Intersections and Interventions: Hindu Sacred Spaces Re-Engaged

(Working Title)

This paper will draw on different vignettes from the region of Vrindavan in India to explore how
religious sites are reframed and reconstructed from a rich array of secular and religious
practices and discourses.

Vrindavan is a sacred place revered by Bengali Vaishnavas, followers of the bhakti sect of
Vaishnavism, one of four branches of Hindu devotion. Followers of the sect, worship the God,
Krishna, who it is believed manifested in Vrindavan and carried out many divine feats and
activities which are imprinted onto the land. Vrindavan today is dotted with thousands of holy
shrines, temples and natural places connected to Krishna. Devotees connect to Krishna through
the landscape of Vrindavan; it is where the transcendental and the physical realms meet.

This paper aims to show how secularism grounded in alternative historic contexts allows us to
understand the different ways in which modern culture materializes visually—or is produced,
reproduced, and transformed and with them the making of religious sites and objects.
Vrindavan has been transformed in a multitude of ways with the influx of money from Western
sources, commercial enterprises and developers that wish to modernize and commercialize
Vrindavan for the new consumer. New infrastructure, condo developments and other changes
illustrate both the challenge and the promise of modernity. This paper examines how these
transformations are impacting the region of Vrindavan, and how they continue to respond to
these changes. It hopes to show how these practices of secularism further our understanding
into the ways faith, religion and modernity are increasingly negotiating on the ground. Further
it seeks to illustrate the centrality of space for the negotiation and constitution of both religious
and public spheres.

How Secularism Impacts Age Old Devotional Practices in India

India’s sacred geography offers a plethora of opportunities to experience a direct and

intimate connection with the divine in its material form. For millions of pilgrims, the physical,

imagined, and spiritual engagement with the landscape is a powerful way to visualize, enact

and reconnect to the divinity embedded in the landscape. In Hinduism, perception of the

sacred known in Sanskrit as the act of darsan which means ‘to see and be seen by the divine

image’ is often limited to the physical, anthropomorphic image of the deity. But for Hindus,

access to the divine is not only limited to images, icons or in murtis but there are a multitude of
conduits by which a devotee or pilgrims experiences divinity; the sacred geography or cultural

landscape is one way. Divinity is embedded in the landscape in India through myths and lila

(divine activities) that are imprinted into the land. The cultural landscape is surcharged with

divinity. Devotees touch the rocks, walk on the sacred dust, hike the mountains, bow down to

the trees, stones, and rivers where the divine is uniquely manifested. In this way they revisit,

relive, and reenact those myths and divine lilas to gain access to higher realms of realization. In

short, cultural landscapes facilitate and animate the devotee’s tangible interaction with the

sacred. A cultural landscape is ‘created, appropriated, organized and represented by human

agency (Campo 1998). Such a view emerges from the concept that landscape is something

modified through cultural processes. Hindu theology on place agrees that the land impacts the

devotee in profound ways but it also concurs that devotees interaction and agency shapes the

land by re-sacralizing the land.

This exchange of experience rooted in place has been profoundly impacted by the rise

of development, urbanization and the increase in tourism at holy sites. This paper explores the

region of Braj in Northern India, a region closely connected to amorous god, Krishna and the

devotional sect Gaudiya Vaishnavism. The paper will illustrate how important the place and

landscape play in connecting powerfully to Krishna and his divine pastimes which are said to

have unfolding in Braj but it will also aim to demonstrate how deforestration, urbanization and

overpopulation are negatively impacting these practices. In this way, the paper aims to

understand how religion and secularism intersect and intervene in Braj.