Discovering gupta -Vrindavan: Finding selves and places in the storied landscape

Abstract

This article seeks to be a contribution to the recent bourgeoning of studies in the anthropology of (sacred) spaces, places and landscapes. Ethnographically, it deals with the social topography of Navadvip and Mayapur, vaishnava pilgrimage places in the Nadia district of West Bengal. It analyses the contemporary articulations of the experience and making of a contrasted and consecrated landscape, and its potential in embodying differentiated community identities. It describes the various public faces of Bengal-Vaishnava groups and argues in favour of the inherent relationships between devotional self-experiences and the emotional landscape which is inhabited and constituted simultaneously. It details the cultural geography of Navadvip and Mayapur as embodied in the layout of different temples and ashrams, and the circulating stories establishing their significance. The stories sometimes hunt out lost sites, sometimes legitimise existing ones and, at other times, override all such concerns over specific sites in favour of a passionate engagement with the entire landscape. In every instance among the plural modes of ‘dwelling’ in the mnemonic-fabled sacred space, the vaishnava groups claim to discover the essence of the landscape and thereby assert their multiform practices of self-experiences as authentic representations of the sect. In the end, the article also contrasts the inhabitants’ landscapes and devotional self-experiences with that of the traveller and throws up new questions in the anthropological understandings of places, landscapes, journeys and devotion.

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