Description

Families have their genealogies and favorite stories; countries have their histories. What history succeeds better for a country than the one capable of molding its citizens into a family? In India, that has been the particular work of a narrative called “the bhakti movement” — bhakti andolan in Hindi. Here bhakti — the religion of the heart, of song and common participation — is seen as a force of history, something like the contagion of North America’s Great Awakenings but spanning a millennium. It formed the religious bedrock that would ultimately, in the 20th century, make the nation possible. Or so we have been taught. This lecture will explore the historical contingencies that actually created this received —and largely Hindu — common sense.

John Stratton Hawley—more informally, Jack—is Professor of Religion at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is the author or editor of nineteen books and is currently working on the twentieth. Several of these focus especially on the worship of Radha and Krishna: At Play with Krishna; Krishna, the Butter Thief; Sur Das: Poet, Singer, Saint; The Divine Consort. Others take a broader view, exploring themes in Hindu poetry and hagiography and in modern Hindu religion: Songs of the Saints of India, Three Bhakti Voices, and (with Vasudha Narayanan) The Life of Hinduism. Several edited volumes stretch beyond South Asia and are comparative—one on exemplary religious persons (Saints and Virtues), one on Fundamentalism and Gender, and a recent book edited with Kimberley Patton called Holy Tears: Weeping in the Religious Imagination.

Jack Hawley has served as director of Columbia’s Southern Asian Institute and has frequently chaired the Religion Department at Barnard College. He has received multiple awards from National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian Institution, and the American Institute of Indian Studies. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow.

His most recent publications are a posthumously edited collection of essays by Dennis Hudson, Krishna’s Mandala: Bhagavata Religion and Beyond (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009) and The Memory of Love: Surdas Sings to Krishna (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).