Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550-1850 0295745371, 9780295745374

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Map of Major Sites in South Asia
Introduction: Climate Change and Art History
One: Water
Two: Land
Three: Forest
Four: Ether
Coda: Geoaesthetics in a Hindu Pilgrimage Town
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Padma Kaimal K. Sivaramakrishnan Anand A. Yang Series Editors

climate change and the art of devotion Geoaesthetics in the L and of Krishna, 1550 –1850 Sugata Ray

University of Washington Press  | Seattle

Climate Change and the Art of Devotion is made possible by a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Publication of this book has also been aided by a grant from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of the College Art Association. Additional support was provided by the Hellman Fellows Fund. Copyright © 2019 by the University of Washington Press Printed and bound in Korea Interior design by April Leidig, Copperline Book Services Composed in Minion Pro typeface designed by Robert Slimbach Photographs are by the author unless otherwise noted. 23 22 21 20 19  5 4 3 2 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. University of Washington Press www.washington.edu/uwpress Library of Congress Cataloging-­i n-­P ublication Data Names: Ray, Sugata, author. Title: Climate change and the art of devotion : geoaesthetics in the land of  Krishna, 1550-­1850 / Sugata Ray. Description: Seattle : University of Washington Press, 2019. | Series: Global  South Asia | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018046962 (print) | LCCN 2018048463 (ebook) |  ISBN 9780295745381 (ebook) | ISBN 9780295745374 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Hindu art—India—Mathura (District) | Hindu art—India—  Bharatpur District. | Ecology in art. | Nature (Aesthetics) Classification: LCC N8195.I4 (ebook) | LCC N8195.I4 R39 2019 (print) |  DDC 704.9/48945—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046962 The paper used in this publication is acid free and meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48–1984.∞ frontis: (Detail) The prophet Elias (Elijah) rescuing Hamza’s nephew, Prince Nur ad-Dahr. Hamzanāma, ca. 1562–77. Gouache on cotton, 68 × 52 cm. Repository: The British Museum, London, 00030552001 © The Trustees of the British Museum. Photo courtesy British Museum.

For Atreyee, my comrade

Contents



Acknowledgments ix Note on Transliteration xi Map of Major Sites in South Asia xiii Introduc tion

Climate Change and Art History 3



One | Water 25



Two | L and 61



Three | Forest 97



Four | Ether 133



Coda

Geoaesthetics in a Hindu Pilgrimage Town 171



Notes 187



Bibliography 209



Index 233

Acknowledgments

The peripatetic journey across continents that eventually led to this book has been immeasurably richer because of many fellow travelers—mentors, colleagues, students, friends—whom I have been fortunate to meet on the way. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to my mentors who set me on this route: Parul D. Mukherji and Shivaji K. Panikkar at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda; Tapati Guha-­Thakurta at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta; and Frederick M. Asher, Catherine B. Asher, Ajay Skaria, Jane Blocker, and Michael Gaudio at the University of Minnesota. The contours of the book were shaped by conversations with Diliana Angelova, Julia Bryan-­ Wilson, Whitney Davis, Darcy G. Grigsby, Atreyee Gupta, Christopher Hallett, Imogen Hart, Elizabeth Honig, Lauren Kroiz, Henrike C. Lange, Anneka Lenssen, Gregory Levine, Margaretta Lovell, Ivy Mills, Todd Olson, Andrew Stewart, and Lisa Trever in the History of Art Department; and Lawrence Cohen, Penny Edwards, Munis D. Faruqui, Robert Goldman, Sally J. Sutherland Goldman, Puneeta Kala, Alexander von Rospatt, Sanchita Saxena, and Bonnie Wade in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies and Institute for South Asia Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. The book materialized through discussions with my students Ariana Pemberton, Ramón De Santiago, and Shivani Sud about the necessity of writing an art history that is attentive to our footprint on the planet. I am grateful for the generous administrative support provided by Lynn Cunningham, Julie Wolf, and John McChesney-­Young in the History of Art Department, without whom the logistics of research and writing would have been daunting. In Vrindavan, Shrivatsa Goswami graciously offered me a home at the Sri Caitanya Prema Samsthana. I am also grateful to the trustees of Radha Gopinath Temple and Shahji Temple for providing access to their private archives. There were others in Braj—pilgrims, priests, and local residents—who took time to speak with me, allowed me to enter their homes, their worlds, their devotion. Much of the archival research for the book was conducted at the Vrindavan Research Institute, the Vrindavan Nagar Palika Parishad, the Mathura Nagar Palika Parishad, and the Government Museum, Mathura in Braj; the National Archives of India, the Center for Art & Archeology at ix

the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Archaeological Survey of India Records Room, and the Central Secretariat Library in New Delhi; the National Library in Calcutta; the Uttar Pradesh State Archives in Lucknow; the Uttar Pradesh Regional Archives in Agra; the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Arabic and Persian Research Institute in Tonk; and the Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections at the British Library and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. I am thankful to the staff at these archives. At the University of Washington Press, I am grateful to the series editors Padma Kaimal, K. Sivaramakrishnan, and Anand A. Yang for taking on the book and to the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable advice. It was an immense pleasure to work with Michael Baccam, Michael O. Campbell, Beth Fuget, Lorri D. Hagman, and Margaret K. Sullivan at the press, and my gratitude to Richard Feit for his insightful copyediting. My sincere thanks to Amit Ambalal, Hannah Baader, Rebecca Brown, Sheba Chhachhi, Deepali Dewan, Daniel Ehnbom, Natasha Eaton, Beate Fricke, Pika Ghosh, Susan Huntington, Jutta Jain-­Neubauer, Monica Juneja, Janice Leoshko, Kama Maclean, Venugopal Maddipati, Priya Maholay-­Jaradi, Saloni Mathur, Cynthia D. Packert, Heidi Pauwels, Yael R. Rice, Edward L. Rothfarb, Tony K. Stewart, James L. Wescoat Jr., and Gerhard Wolf for their suggestions, thoughts, and guidance and their immense generosity over the years. Generous support in the form of subventions, fellowships, and grants from several institutions made possible the completion of the book: the College Art Association’s Millard Meiss Publication Fund; the Hellman Fellows Fund; the University of California Humanities Research Institute; the Townsend Center for the Humanities and the Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley; the Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices Program at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin; the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, Max-­Planck-­Institute; the American Institute of Indian Studies; and the Social Science Research Council. Early versions of chapter 1 were published in Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, and Water Design: Environment and Histories. But the journey began much earlier. With my family, Krishna Ray, Bejoy Chakraborty, and Panchali Ray, and my extended family, Swapan Gupta, Tapati Gupta, and Deep Basu. Somewhere along the way, I met Atreyee. Together, we traveled the road. This book is for you, this book is with you.

x acknowled gment s

Note on Transliteration

Given the diversity in regional iterations of terminologies, names, and places in South Asia, diacritical marks have been omitted with the exception of direct quotations from texts and the citation of the titles of books and manuscripts. In the case of a direct quotation, I have retained the transliteration employed in the original text or translation. All South Asian names and terminologies have been transliterated into their generally accepted nineteenth-­and twentieth-­ century Westernized forms. Thus, Kṛṣṇa is transliterated as Krishna and Vṛndāvana as Vrindavan. As much as this transliteration serves to make the book accessible, it also functions as a reminder of the minute techniques through which colonial modernity had transformed indigenous ways of speaking, writing, and thinking. To return to Vṛndāvana, then, is an epistemological impossibility.

xi

Yamun a

G a n ga

New Delhi

wa

Sanchi

B et

Mathura Bharatpur Agra Lucknow Jaipur Fatehpur Sikri Kishangarh Jaunpur Ajmer Gwalior Isarda Bundi Orchha Varanasi Nathdwara Allahabad

Nabadwip Bishnupur Calcutta

Surat Puri

Bombay Arabian Sea

Goa

Hampi

Bay of Bengal

Mamallapuram

200 mi

Indian Ocean

Map i.1. Major sites in South Asia mentioned in this book. Courtesy Ramón De Santiago.

Climate Change and the Art of Devotion

Introduction Climate Change and Art History

Between 1545 and 1576, a catastrophic cocoliztli epidemic in Mexico killed over seven million people. Similar in scale to the Black Death (1347–51) in western Europe, the epidemic—marked by hemorrhagic fever with death within three to four days—led to the decimation of over 80 percent of the indigenous population within a period of thirty years.1 While colonial expansion was undoubtedly responsible for the exceptionally high mortality rate in mid-­ sixteenth-­century Mexico, dendrochronology from tree rings in Durango suggests that the microbial epidemic occurred during the sixteenth-­century “megadrought,” one of the severest droughts in North America in the past five hundred years.2 The lack of water and food led to rodent attacks on human settlements, instigating the fatal cocoliztli epidemic. While Spanish observers designated the epidemic as the “great pestilence,” Nahua chroniclers not only described the calamity in great detail but also left pictorial records of victims hemorrhaging blood after becoming infected.3 In a folio from the Aubin Codex (ca. 1576), a manuscript that recounts Mexica history from the twelfth century, we encounter representations of the accessions of Tenochca leaders, the 1540 Mixtón War fought against Spanish rule in New Galicia, and the 1545 epidemic, among other significant sixteenth-­century events (figure I.1).4 In retrospect, the insertion of a pictographic representation of an epidemic propelled by a series of cataclysmic droughts in a codex that records the history of Mexico offers an apropos opening through which to envisage the transterritorial configurations of an art history of the ecological crises of the sixteenth century. The Mexican case was not unique. The Caribbean, northeast Brazil, parts of West Africa, South Africa, Ethiopia, and Southeast Asia, among other regions, also faced a series of cataclysmic droughts in this period.5 In South Asia, famines induced by droughts took a critical turn from 1554 onward.6 Using 3

I.1. Codex Aubin, 46v, 47r., ca. 1576. Natural pigment on European paper, 15 × 11 cm. Repository: The British Museum, London, Am2006, Drg.31219 © The Trustees of the British Museum. Photo courtesy British Museum.

contemporaneous textual records and narrative accounts that annotate the effects of environmental calamities, historians and climatologists have compiled a fairly comprehensive list of the many droughts that occurred in South Asia between 1550 and 1850.7 Along with reports of the effects of monsoon failure in early modern texts, we can trace references to natural calamities in South Asia’s visual archive as well. Commissioned by the illustrious Mughal emperor Jalal al-­Din Muhammad Akbar (1542–1605) in 1582, the Millennial History (Tarikh-­i Alfi), for instance, includes a folio depicting prayers being offered at the Ka‘ba during a disastrous drought in the reign of the Abbasid Caliph al-­Mutawakkil ‘Ala Allah (822–61).8 While art historians have read the Millennial History in relationship to Akbar’s political ideology, we can perhaps also read the allusion to the mid-­ninth-­century drought in the folio as a visual expression of the sovereign’s concern with natural catastrophes in the first Islamic millennium (figure I.2).9 The painting was possibly envisioned as an observation on the calamities that afflicted al-­Mutawakkil’s territories as a result of his persecution of both non-­Muslim communities and Shi‘a Muslims.10 Conceivably, it served to distinguish al-­Mutawakkil’s reign from Akbar’s own monarchy, defined by 4 intr oduc tion

an imperial strategy of sulh-­i kull, religious reconciliation or tolerance (often translated as “universal peace”), from 1579 onward.11 To further underscore the difference, the recto of the folio illustrates a ca. 859 earthquake in Antioch and a ninth-­century hailstorm of unprecedented intensity in Egypt under the reign of the Abbasid Caliphate. Akbar’s seeming preoccupation with apocalyptic natural catastrophes might have had something to do with messianic myths of the millennium as the culmination of a thousand-­year epoch that began, according to the Millennial History, with the year of the Prophet’s death. The manuscript, after all, was intended to be completed by 1592 to mark the conclusion of the first Islamic millennium. Yet the emperor’s speculations on the connection between environmental disasters and governance might have been prompted by contemporaneous droughts that were afflicting his own empire. It is likely that the folio depicting the offering of prayers during a catastrophic ninth-­century drought was completed around 1595.12 According to the History of Akbar (Akbarnāma), the official chronicle of the reign of Akbar, the preceding year had brought little rainfall. This prompted the emperor to dispatch officials with food provisions across the realm by way of famine relief.13 By 1596, insufficient rainfall had thrown the “world into distress.”14 In his Half a Tale (Ardhakathānaka; 1641), an autobiography in verse, the poet Banarasidas, too, described the drought-­induced famine of 1596 as being extremely severe.15 According to other contemporaneous chroniclers, the droughts across the subcontinent persisted relentlessly for the next three or four years.16 Thus, messianic fables notwithstanding, the acute interest in natural calamities in the Millennial History may well have been a reflection of Akbar’s concern with the socio-­economic impact of massive climatic upheavals that were unfolding in the Mughal realm as the Persian text was being composed. By the 1550s, South Asia was already encountering catastrophic monsoon failures. The History of Akbar, for instance, records in great detail the ravages of a 1554 drought caused by the failure of monsoon.17 Visiting Akbar’s capital in Fatehpur Sikri in the 1580s, the Portuguese Jesuit priest Antonio Monserrate noted the meticulous efforts being made to conserve water. Monserrate writes, “To supply the city with water a tank has been carefully and laboriously constructed, two miles long and half a mile wide. . . . Across the end of a low-­lying valley which was filled with water in the rains, (although the water afterwards drained away or dried up), a great dam was slowly built. By this means, not only was a copious supply of water assured, but the discomfort of the climate was mitigated.”18 The situation would only escalate in the seventeenth century, with millions dying from starvation during the droughts of the 1630s and the 1680s.19 The failure of the monsoon in South Asia from the mid-­sixteenth century onward was a direct result of a global climatic upheaval that affected almost every continent. As the environmental historian Richard H. Grove and geographer George Adamson note, droughts in western India in 1423 were followed by roughly a century of pluvial increase.20 By the mid-­sixteenth century, however, intr oduc tion   5

I.2. Page of disasters from Tarikh-­i Alfi, ca. 1595. Ink and color on paper, 41 × 22.6 cm. Repository: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Dudley P. Allen Fund 1932.36.b. Photo © The Cleveland Museum of Art.

6 intr oduc tion

I.3. View of Vrindavan, the site in Braj where Krishna purport­edly spent his youth.

expanding glaciers in the Alps had led to steadily declining temperatures in Europe.21 While temperatures declined in Europe, this climatic epoch, now described as the Little Ice Age, witnessed an unusually high occurrence of El Niño–induced droughts in South America, Africa, and South and Southeast Asia caused by fluctuations in the sea surface temperatures that shape the global climatic system.22 It is the effects of these droughts that Monserrate described and the History of Akbar chronicled. The Millennial History, too, had been illustrated by artists in Akbar’s atelier during the droughts of the Little Ice Age. Keeping this larger constellation of early modern transterritorial climatic upheavals in sight, Climate Change and the Art of Devotion turns to Braj, a pilgrimage center thirty miles north of the Mughal capital of Fatehpur Sikri and ninety miles south of India’s capital, New Delhi. Today, Braj is internationally celebrated as the site where the divine Krishna is believed to have spent his youth (figure I.3). Over the years, this ninety-­square-­mile pilgrimage center surrounding the modern city of Mathura has inspired numerous eulogies, including George Harrison’s “It Is He,” composed shortly after a 1974 visit to Braj.23 That Braj was described in 2005 by the American multimedia company National Public Radio as a “geography of heaven” perhaps only attests to the continued international fascination with a site that, according to sixteenth-­ century scriptural texts, is the place where Krishna lives eternally.24 intr oduc tion   7

Crucially for us, it was during a period of catastrophic climatic upheavals that devotees of Krishna traveled to Braj to “discover” the sites associated with the Hindu god’s life on earth.25 In time, an extraordinary place-­oriented theology emerged in Braj, one that not only centralized the veneration of the natural environment but also perceived each stone, waterbody, and tree in the pilgrimage center as sacred and effervescent with immanent energy. Drawing on this sacramental theology, a rich visual culture that triangulated affective aesthetics, political governance, and natural-­resource management also emerged in the region. This visual culture, which found concrete articulation only after the commencement of a climatic epoch that led to catastrophic droughts in north India beginning in the 1550s, is the subject of this book. Undoubtedly, artists and patrons, before and after the sixteenth century and in and beyond South Asia, have experimented with visual and architectural form in response to climate change; this book is by no means a survey of such artistic engagements across a longue durée. Rather, it uses Braj as a case study to explore intersections between visual practices and large-­scale transformations in the natural environment. As historians of religion have noted, there was something exceptional about the liturgy of early modern Braj, for the emphasis on embodied land in sixteenth-­century theological texts—the idea that Krishna lives eternally in Braj in north India and in the transcendent realm—engendered a pilgrimage practice that privileged a sensorial experience of place.26 Although pilgrimage across sectarian and religious boundaries certainly has a shared sensibility in relationship to sacred land, it is the liturgy of embodied place that makes Braj an exemplary case study.27 Climate Change and the Art of Devotion thus moves between the creative practices based on sacramental theology that developed in early modern Braj and the transterritorial climatic fields of an ecological crisis that paralleled it. Emphasizing the inter­ relationship between matter and life—both human and nonhuman—in shaping art and architecture in Braj, the book foregrounds the seepages between the natural ecosystem and creative configurations. In this process, an art history of the ecological crisis now designated as the Little Ice Age comes to the fore.

The Topographies of Embodied Devotion in Braj Visiting Mathura in ca. 400 CE, the Chinese pilgrim Faxian described the region as a thriving Buddhist pilgrimage center with over twenty monasteries and three thousand monks.28 Although Hindu texts such as the Bhāgavata Purāṇa (Ancient Tales of the Lord; late ninth or early tenth century CE) designated Braj as the site where Krishna, an incarnation of Vishnu, defeated the evil serpent Kaliya, slew the demon Keshi, and danced with his devotees, monumental sandstone sculptures excavated in this region suggest that in the early centuries of the Common Era, Braj was an important Buddhist center.29 However, Hindu and Jain sculpture found in this ninety-­square-­mile site indicates 8 intr oduc tion

I.4. Prayer hall, Chaurasi Khambha Mosque, Kaman, ca. 1200.

that temples to non-­Buddhist deities were also being built in Braj in this period. Nonetheless, except for temple pillars reused in the ca. 1200 Chaurasi Khambha Mosque at Kaman, a site forty miles west of Mathura, and Assi Khambha Mosque at Mahavan, located six miles southeast of Mathura, few architectural remains have survived from before the sixteenth century (figure I.4).30 intr oduc tion   9

It was only with the construction of four colossal red-­sandstone temples in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that an extant artistic vocabulary of Krishna worship materialized in Braj. The theological impulse for the construction of these temples can be traced back to Chaitanya (1486–1533), the mystic from the city of Nabadwip in West Bengal, eastern India, who was responsible for creating an entirely new paradigm of Krishna worship in the early sixteenth century.31 In pre-­sixteenth-­century north India, the divine Krishna was characteristically imagined as a cakravartin (a monarchical divinity) who was the embodiment of a warrior-­king, a kshatriya, Vishnu’s representative on earth.32 In south India, however, with the rise of a more intimate form of worship known as bhakti (usually translated as “devotion”), this monarchical figure had by the eighth century already been transformed into a divine lover.33 The new Krishna, a playful cowherd, was fundamentally unlike the divine warrior-­king of north India. By the twelfth century, the love play between Krishna and his primary consort, Radha, became the focus of a rich body of Vaishnava devotional poetry (poetry devoted to the god Vishnu) in eastern India as well.34 In this new form, Vaishnavism articulated a more intense “emotional bhakti,” or devotion for Krishna, that moved away from earlier orthodox practices of seeing the divine as a warrior god.35 The symbolism of divine love, in which the devotee imagined herself or himself as either Radha or a gopi (the female cowherd companion of the divine couple), created a new vocabulary of religiosity within which yearning for the divine, yearning for an absent lover, became the ideal form of bhakti.36 And it was Chaitanya who brought this new Vaishnavism of emotional sublimation to Braj around 1514. Chaitanya’s emotional devotion was based on earlier paradigms of bhakti espoused by south Indian Vaishnava poets who reified emotional experience over ritualistic practice. Although ritualism was not completely rejected, followers of Chaitanya asserted that rituals were merely a mode of disciplining the mind and the body, a devotional practice called vaidhi bhakti (disciplined devotion) that led to the ultimate goal of immersing oneself in Krishna through raganuga bhakti (passionate devotion).37 Central to this new paradigm of Chaitanya’s Vaishnavism was Braj, the place where Krishna lives eternally. Soon after Chaitanya’s arrival, disciples formed a strong center of Vaishnavism in Braj. Along with the making of a new Vaishnava sect, now known as Gaudiya Vaishnavism, Chaitanya is also credited with identifying sites in Braj that he believed were associated with Krishna’s life. Krishna was born in a prison in modern Mathura after his uncle, Kamsa, had imprisoned Krishna’s parents.38 On the very night of his birth, his father smuggled Krishna out of prison to an encampment—identified as the modern town of Gokul—of the herdsman Nanda, who would become his adoptive father. Nanda and his pastoral community eventually set up a new encampment in what is now Vrindavan while Krishna was growing up. A hill in modern-­day Govardhan, a small

10 intr oduc tion

town fourteen miles west of Vrindavan, was identified as the hill that Krishna held up to protect his adoptive community from the torrential rain sent by Indra, the king of gods. In each instance, Chaitanya identified geographical markers in the topography of the region that allowed him to claim the area as the primordial space inhabited by Krishna. Scriptural descriptions of sacred spaces were marshaled as evidence. A grove with an old banyan tree on the east bank of the Yamuna, the river that flows through the region, became the legendary site of Bhandirvan, where Krishna had brought forth water from the ground and where to this day a well is said to turn milky during the new moon.39 Describing the sixteenth-­century making of this sacred topography, the literary scholar Alan W. Entwistle writes: From the mid-­sixteenth century onwards the number of sacred places around Mathura multiplied. Nothing was too trivial for the pioneers of the pilgrimage route; they discovered a location for every canonical episode and apocryphal incident in the life of Krishna; a sacred association was found for practically every village, pond, or landmark in the district. Apart from incorporating all kinds of natural phenomena, they also made use of such second-­hand objects as ruins, mounds, and fragments of sculpture that had featured in earlier cults. So inflated was the number of places that came to light, so flimsy were the pretexts that inspired their discovery, so irrelevant were they for any kind of religious function, that many of them failed to gain recognition and can no longer be identified.40 In order to link these spaces to the mythological realm where Krishna dallied with Radha, Gaudiya theologians reiterated that Vajranabha, the great grandson of Krishna, had reclaimed the sacred spaces of Braj by building temples, establishing wells and tanks, and inviting Krishna’s adoptive clan to return to the region.41 Chaitanya, then, was not responsible for discovering these sites. Rather, he was responsible for reinitiating worship at sites that had already been discovered by Krishna’s great grandson himself. To fully experience the sacredness of Braj’s topography marked by signs of Krishna’s inhabitance, Gaudiya theologians proposed a form of circumambulation of the pilgrimage center that included worshiping the specific sites where Krishna had allegedly spent his youth. The circumambulation of Braj covered an area stretching eight miles to the southwest of modern Mathura and nearly thirty-­one miles to the west and east. According to pilgrimage manuals such as the Devotional Enjoyments of Braj (Vrajabhaktivilāsa; 1552), the oldest extant itinerary for a Braj circumambulation, a pilgrimage to the region entailed visiting 137 sacred forests.42 In time, Mathura (the site of Krishna’s birth), Gokul (where Krishna spent his childhood), Vrindavan (where Krishna spent his

intr oduc tion   11

to New Delhi

Yam u n i aR

r ve

Bhandirvan Kaman

Barsana

Vrindavan Radhakund Mathura

Govardhan Dig

Gokul Mahavan

Bharatpur 5 mi

to Agra

to Fatehpur Sikri

Map I.2. Major pilgrimage sites in Braj. Courtesy Ramón De Santiago.

youth), Barsana (where Radha grew up), and Govardhan (the hill that Krishna raised to protect the pastoral communities of Braj) became the key sites in this pilgrimage route (map I.2). Modern Braj as the land of Krishna worship was thus invented. Of course, the Gaudiyas were not the only Vaishnava sect active in Braj in the sixteenth century. According to narratives presented in sectarian hagiography, Vallabha (1478–1530), a Brahmin from the pilgrimage center of Varanasi in northern India, had established a temple in Govardhan in Braj in 1519 to commemorate the discovery of a self-manifesting icon of Krishna that had 12

intr odUc tion

emerged from the hill.43 A dispute in the 1570s between the Gaudiya followers of Chaitanya and the Pushtimarg (the path of grace) followers of Vallabha over the control of Govardhan suggests that Braj had become a significant pilgrimage center in north India by the mid-­sixteenth century. As the Jesuit priest Monserrate, who also visited Braj, wrote, “Temples dedicated to Viznu [Vishnu] are to be found in many places in the neighbourhood [of Braj], built in spots where the silly old-­wives-­fables (of the Hindus) declare that he performed some action.”44 Monserrate’s account indicates that Chaitanya’s and Vallabha’s attempts at constructing Braj as the land of Krishna had become increasingly popular. As Monserrate asserted, temples were built in the region based on “silly old-­wives-­fables” of Krishna’s continued corporeal presence in the region. In the early sixteenth century, the region now known as Braj was a cluster of sleepy villages; most of the monasteries and temples from the early centuries of the Common Era that travelers such as Faxian and Xuanzang described had either been destroyed or abandoned.45 While archeological evidence indicates that both Hindu and Jain temples were intermittently built in the region in the medieval period, it was under Sher Shah Suri (ca. 1486–1545), the Afghan commander from Bengal who had seized the Mughal throne in 1540, that Braj became a nodal point in an imperial network of trade and communication with the construction of a roadway connecting Delhi and Agra through Mathura.46 The subsequent escalation of trade led to the development of a rich mercantile center in Mathura. By the time Akbar constructed his imperial capital in Fatehpur Sikri, thirty miles from Mathura, Braj had become an important pilgrimage center, with “huge crowds of pilgrims” visiting the region.47 Along with the Gaudiyas and the Pushtimargis, a number of other Vaishnava sects flourished in Braj in the sixteenth century within this matrix of an emergent mercantilism. Each of these sects emphasized a particular aspect of intimate devotion as a way to immerse oneself in Krishna.48 For the purposes of our discussion, what is important to note is this: Despite differences, in each instance, the diverse forms of Vaishnavism in Braj emphasized the importance of seeing or ritually beholding the topography of the region as key to devotional liturgy. Thus, the natural environment of Braj was given liturgical significance equal to the elaborate rituals of icon worship. For instance, although the river Yamuna that passes through Braj had already been deified as an anthropomorphic goddess in the early centuries of the Common Era, the followers of Chaitanya and Vallabha instituted a form of water worship that perceived divine presence not only in anthropomorphic icons but also in the natural form of the river as it flowed through the region. Along with the river Yamuna, rocks, trees, and even the dust of Braj came to be considered charged with immanent energy.49 Crucially for us, this new liturgy of place materialized during the monsoon failures of the Little Ice Age, which unsettled any conception of nature as pristine and bountiful.

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The Little Ice Age The Little Ice Age is crucial to our story. Based on observations of the glaciers of the Sierra Nevada in California, the geologist François E. Matthes coined the term “Little Ice Age” in 1939 to describe the four-­thousand-­year period of dramatic glacial advances and retreats during the Late Holocene.50 In the 1970s, climatologists, geographers, and glaciologists contended that the climatic epoch of the Little Ice Age should more appropriately designate the period between 1550 and 1850, when mountain glaciers expanded to their greatest extent in response to diminishing solar output, changes in atmospheric circulation, and massive volcanic activity after the Medieval Warm Period (ca. 900–1300 CE).51 In the subsequent decades, paleoclimatologists mobilized proxy data gained from tree rings, cave deposits, pollen samples, and ice cores to demonstrate that temperatures in Europe had indeed dropped below the thousand-­year average between 1000 and 2000 CE.52 The Little Ice Age garnered a similar degree of attention from historians as well, who examined administrative archives, memoirs, and travel accounts to recover the social, political, and economic histories of this climatic epoch.53 It was Fernand Braudel’s La Méditerranée, the tour de force history of the Mediterranean world during the reign of Philip II, that laid the groundwork for a reexamination of the political and economic histories of early modern Europe in relation to large-­scale environmental transformations.54 The cultural imprints of the Little Ice Age have received some attention in recent years. Consider, for instance, the climatologist Michael E. Mann’s 2002 account: In the Chamonix valley near Mont Blanc, France, numerous farms and villages were lost to the advancing front of a nearby mountain glacier. The damage was so threatening that the villagers summoned the Bishop of Geneva to perform an exorcism of the dark forces presumed responsible (this procedure, as for most human attempts at weather modification, does not appear to have been successful). Such societal threats were common during the late 17th and early 18th centuries, as many glaciers expanded well beyond their previous historical limits. Colder conditions combined with altered patterns of atmospheric circulation, appear to be tied to the prevalent crop failures in the more northern areas of Europe of the time. There are widespread reports of famine, disease, and increased child mortality in Europe during the 17th–19th century that are probably related, at least in part, to colder temperatures and altered weather conditions.55 Reading the impact of environmental transformations on human life, Mann, among other scholars, has offered a model for narrating a history that takes into account the intersections between the biophysical world and the world of knowledge, culture, and power, all of which form integral components of the 14 intr oduc tion

Map I.3. Global impact of the El Niño Southern Oscillation: June–August patterns (top); December–February patterns (bottom). Courtesy NOAA Climate.gov.

new interdisciplinary field called environmental history.56 Without doubt, this environmental opening within the humanities more broadly has had paradigmatic effects. Yet internal to the classification of the Little Ice Age is embedded an Alpinocentrism (read, Eurocentrism) that both names and designates an entire climatic period in world history based on declining temperatures in Europe. The effects of the climatic upheavals were unequivocally global. But its manifestation in South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and coastal South America was distinctly dissonant from that of Europe. The Little Ice Age witnessed an abnormally high occurrence of the warm phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation in the central and east-­central equatorial Pacific coastline off South America.57 Associated with a band of warm ocean water that is accompanied by high air pressure in the western Pacific and low air pressure in the eastern Pacific, the El Niño Southern Oscillation leads to significant monsoon failures in Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia (map I.3). Archival records reveal that between the 1550s and the 1850s—in the intr oduc tion   15

period of the Little Ice Age—the number of global El Niño events were unprecedented. Paleometeorological reconstructions from Peru, for instance, reveal that during the Little Ice Age, around ninety-­seven El Niño incidents occurred, which led to droughts as far as West Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.58 Thus, from a different geo-­perspective, the Little Ice Age may well be designated as the age of droughts. For even as the epoch remains identified as a period of decreasing temperature in Europe, much of the world experienced an increase in temperature and droughts. The 1596 El Niño on the Pacific coast, for instance, led to devastating droughts in South and Southeast Asia.59 This is the same drought that the poet Banarasidas, then based in the north Indian city of Jaunpur, would describe as having pushed the world into a condition of acute suffering (jagat behal—“world suffering”—in Banarasidas’ words).60 As we have seen, a similar sentiment found expression in the History of Akbar. Nonetheless, glacialization and falling temperatures in Europe and El Niño– induced droughts in other parts of the world were fundamentally interconnected by the North Atlantic Oscillation, the fluctuations in the atmospheric pressure at sea level between Iceland and the Azores. This led to extreme weather throughout the tropical zones, as research conducted by the climatologist Jacob A. B. Bjerknes, among others, demonstrates.61 Indeed, this climatic configuration remains at play even today. Based on computed atmospheric models, Richard Grove and the geographer John Chappell, for instance, have shown that the North Atlantic Oscillation and the Southern Oscillation have remained strongly correlated in the last 180 years.62 Thus, negative phases of the North Atlantic Oscillation statistically tend to precede negative El Niño phases of the Southern Oscillation index. Connecting the hydroclimatic variabilities of the Southern Oscillation to the North Atlantic Oscillation, we also begin to see the Little Ice Age as a global ecological crisis. The Vaishnava actors in my narrative were almost certainly unacquainted with the sweeping climatic transformations that were occurring concurrently in the Americas, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Europe in this period. Thus, their artistic responses to monsoon failures, droughts, deforestation, and climate change were specifically embedded within the ecumenical world of Braj. As early as 1982, the climatologist Hubert H. Lamb observed that seventeenth-­ century texts suggest that there were more monsoon failures in South Asia during that period than during the twentieth century.63 Art historians are yet to mine this invaluable data. But histories of the Little Ice Age in other parts of the world offer insightful paradigms to locate linkages between climate change and economic and social transformations.64 Building on this recent scholarship, Climate Change and the Art of Devotion brings environmental humanities into conversation with South Asia’s early modern and colonial art history by recovering artistic practices that emerged from rhizomatic entanglements between matter and life, shaped, as it were, by the global flow of water and air.

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Eco Art History: Genealogies and Approaches A genealogy for a mode of writing an art history that is attentive to the forces of the earth can be traced back to the very formation of the discipline in the eighteenth century. In 1764, the German art historian Johann J. Winckelmann declared in his foundational History of Art of Antiquity (Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums) that the preeminence of ancient Greek art can be traced, in part, to the temperate climate of the region.65 The environmental determinism inherent in Winckelmann’s eighteenth-­century celebration of Hellenic culture—the idea that the temperate climate of southern Europe produced superior art—was soon adopted by European writers such as Karl A. Ehrensvärd.66 Also developed in eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century art history was the conceptual obverse—the notion that climate was at the root of the inferior quality of art and architecture produced in the colonies. The climatic differences between temperate and tropical zones—that is, between Europe and its colonies—was consequently seen through a lens of a relativism that by the nineteenth century was reinforced by theories of eugenics and evolutionist race science.67 By the 1950s and 1960s, however, a more nuanced history of art perceptive to the natural world had developed. Millard Meiss, for instance, investigated the role of the Black Death in fundamentally transforming Sienese and Florentine art, while George Kubler provocatively suggested that rather than a history of style based on bio-­evolutionary models, the flow of energy from and between objects offered a better system with which to comprehend aesthetic transmissions.68 Such studies were admittedly few and far between. Only in the 2000s did the contrapuntal pressure of postcolonial ecophilosophy and vital materialism profoundly transform the disciplinary horizons of art history. In retrospect, 2009 and 2010 emerge as key years in this historiography, when Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “The Climate of History” and Jane Bennett’s book on vibrant matter were published concurrently.69 This was perhaps a coincidence. Nonetheless, the temporal convergence was symptomatic of the intellectual debates that were unfolding across disciplines as the looming threat of anthropogenic global warming became more and more tangible. By 2008, as part of the broadening consensus that we were crossing a tipping point at an accelerated rate, the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London had already considered a proposal to make the Anthropocene—the current geological epoch, viewed as the period in which human activity has been the dominant force on the environment—a formal unit of geological-­ epoch divisions.70 It is in this context that Chakrabarty proposed that the human species now exercises a geological force on the planet on the scale of volcanoes and tectonic plates, while Bennett, responding to renewed attention to “encounters between people-­materialities and thing-­materialities,” developed a theory of vibrant matter that erases distinctions between living beings

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and matter in our embattled Anthropocene present.71 Despite intense debates in the climate sciences regarding the precise historical moment that instigated the Anthropocene epoch, the implications of such a theory of things on a discipline that focuses on material culture was profound.72 In parallel, art produced after the Industrial Revolution—during the so-­called Great Acceleration, with its unprecedented use of fossil fuels—was becoming a crucial arena for locating an ecological aesthetics in and of the Anthropocene. As the art historian Alan C. Braddock notes, “Since around 1990, scholars have regularly addressed the environmental significance of contemporary art. Rare, however, are ecocritical studies investigating art before the 1960s—before modern environmentalism made ecology a cause célèbre.”73 While a number of recent books have pushed the temporal frames of ecocritical analyses to emphasize the relationship between the human species and the natural environment in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, art history, for the most part, is yet to engage with the period preceding modernity.74 Writing on Claude Monet’s 1873 Impression: Sun Rising in relation to industrialization in Normandy, Nicholas Mirzoeff, for instance, notes that the pre-­Anthropocene—the “10,000 years of the preceding Holocene”—was a period characterized by “unusually stable climatic conditions that made human agriculture and civilization possible.”75 And herein lies a critical conundrum. A plethora of divergent intellectual and material practices preceding the Industrial Revolution have come to be cordoned off within constructions of both civilizational and ecological plenitude. There is, of course, an epistemic difference between art produced under the menacing shadows of the expanding glaciers of the Little Ice Age and art produced under the existential threat imposed by humans themselves in the epoch of the Anthropocene. For while the Little Ice Age was induced by geological forces, the Anthropocene was prompted by anthropogenic forces, albeit on the scale of the geological. In terms of a creative or artistic response to large-­scale environmental transformations, an art history of the Little Ice Age, then, provides a somewhat different perspective to the genealogies of ecological aesthetics, as we will see. In the context of the history of art and architecture in South Asia, we can go back to as early as 2200 BCE to envisage the intersection between worldscale transformations in art, wide environmental catastrophes and large-­ architecture, and urban patterns. Paleohydrological evidence reveals that the Harappan civilization, the urban cultures that developed on the plains of the Indus Valley of Pakistan and northwestern India in the middle of the third millennium BCE, declined between approximately 9000 and 3000 cal BP, coincident with decreasing western equatorial Pacific sea-­surface temperature and an increasing frequency and amplitude of El Niño Southern Oscillation events. While social instabilities, Aryan invasions, and weakened trade have been attributed as possible causes that led to the decline of Harappan urban

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I.5. Arjuna’s penance and the descent of the Ganga. Mamallapuram, Tamil Nadu, seventh century CE. Relief on granite boulder, 30 m × 15 m. Photo courtesy John C. Huntington, courtesy the Huntington Photographic Archive of Buddhist and Asian Art.

cultures, recent paleoclimatological studies reveal that hydrological calamities contributed significantly to the culmination of this civilization.76 But alongside civilizations that emerged (or dissolved) as a result of ecological transformations, artists, architects, and patrons in South Asia have long mobilized the forces of the natural world to envisage aesthetic systems. In the seventh century, the Pallava rulers of south India, for instance, commissioned a colossal 30 × 15 m relief depicting the descent of the Ganga on granite boulders facing the Bay of Bengal at Mamallapuram in Tamil Nadu (figure I.5). The perpendicular natural cleft between two boulders was transformed into the river Ganga, as water cascaded from a cistern on the summit of the rock.77 From an eco-­art historical perspective, we can see how the Pallavas mobilized the hydrological dynamism of flowing water to enunciate an art practice in the seventh century. The coalescence of flowing water and the mythological narrative of the river’s descent to earth in the relief at Mamallapuram foregrounds premodern aesthetic systems that fundamentally interwove natural and cultural worlds. Much later, emperors such as Zahir al-­Din Muhammad

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Babur (1483–1530), the founder of the Mughal dynasty, commissioned gardens, water pavilions, and reservoirs to both conserve water and to embellish imperial land. Scholars of South Asian art have also been acutely aware of the natural environment and its impact on aesthetic practices from the very onset of the discipline in the colony. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, the preeminent Sri Lankan philosopher and art historian who began his career as geologist, for instance, employed the nature-­oriented aesthetics of art and architecture in South Asia as an opening to confront the logocentric rationalism of European metropolitan art history. As early as 1934, Coomaraswamy outlined the equivalences between medieval (pre-­Enlightenment) European and South Asian art to suggest that the essence of art was “to bring back into order the multiplicity of Nature.”78 Coomaraswamy’s interpretations, however, remained arranged within fantastic frames of speculative metaphysics. But it is in the writings of the Moravian-­Austrian art historian Stella Kramrisch, who arrived in India in 1921 after completing a doctoral dissertation on early Buddhist art at the University of Vienna, that we find a more granular account of the intersections among theology, art practice, and an aesthetics of the natural world. Rejecting the master narrative of colonial art history, Kramrisch proposed that fifth-­century Buddhist sculpture was an outcome of transubstantiation that occurred when the vegetal migrated into the body (figure I.6). Noting the lack of botanical ornamentation in late fifth-­century Buddhist sculpture, Kramrisch wrote, “The body becomes plant-­like in swaying rhythm and plasticity; it is the vessel of the movement of the physical and of inner life. . . . The human body . . . does not stand for physical appearance. It is the form of movement of life.”79 Indeed, unlike earlier sculptures of the Buddha from Mathura with elaborately ornamented nimbuses with radiating lotus petals, effusive floral scrolls, garlands, and rosettes, late fifth-­century sculptures of the Buddha were relatively unembellished. The body, Kramrisch then suggested, had become plant life, the human and the vegetal irrevocably intertwined into one body pulsating with animated energy. Moving away from the logocentrism of earlier colonial writing, Kramrisch thus explored an art history that did not measure the sculpted form in human terms. Might such a resignification of the human body as plant life—a direct reversal of colonial logocentrism—provide an entry point for considering deeper histories of an eco art history? Might we be able to mobilize Kramrisch’s schema to alter the symbiotic relationship between the natural world and human life beyond the logocentric logic of post-­Enlightenment reason, with its emphasis on scientific empiricism? In this book, the underscoring of geoaesthetics as a critical frame serves to engage tractions between the ecological and the aesthetic. The term geoaesthetics has emerged only recently in scholarly discourse. In 2004, the American philosopher Gary Shapiro used the term to designate 1970s land art and 20 intr oduc tion

I.6. Standing Buddha from Sarnath, second half of the fifth century CE. Sandstone, 127 cm (height). Repository: National Museum, New Delhi, 59.527/3.

environmental art as a “form of thinking that works between the territory and the earth by opening up zones of indeterminacy.”80 From then on, the concept-­term geoaesthetics has received significant attention in the study of twentieth-­century art and architecture. Indeed, in the last few years, conferences, curatorial projects, and edited volumes have investigated the political imperatives of geoaesthetics in our ecologically besieged present.81 The intellectual genealogies of the term, however, take us back to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s geophilosophy as a philosophy from the earth. intr oduc tion   21

Returning to the geological thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari demarcated geophilosophy as conceptually analogous to Braudel’s geohistory, that is, the history of the human species’ relation with the natural environment charted through the ebbs and flows of the Mediterranean.82 But the trajectory from Braudel’s geohistory through Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy to geoaesthetics brings to the fore the role of art and architecture in shaping a relational aesthetic philosophy. Defining geoaesthetics as an approach within art history, Climate Change and the Art of Devotion addresses artistic and architectural practices that were shaped through human interaction with geographical, geological, botanical, zoological, mineralogical, astronomical, and climatic formations. Moving from sixteenth-­century illustrated manuscripts that were commissioned when the site was established to nineteenth-­century architecture, the book documents and narrates the key moments of artistic and architectural innovations in Braj.

Ecological Clusters in the Land of Krishna The natural topography of Braj was constituted in liturgy as embodied ecological clusters. In fidelity to these topographic constellations, this book is organized around four elemental themes: water (the theophanic river Yamuna that traverses the region); land (Govardhan hill that Krishna miraculously lifted); forest (the sacred groves of Braj where Krishna roamed with his devotees); and ether (akasa, the natural element that holds together the principal components of Braj’s sacred ecosystem). Water was central to artistic expression during the calamitous droughts that commenced with the onset of the Little Ice Age. Although pre-­sixteenth-­ century ritualistic norms mandated haptic and gustatory absorption as primary forms of engagement with sacred water, by the mid-­sixteenth century, liturgical texts in Braj were asserting that beholding the theophanic presence of the river Yamuna as it flowed through the pilgrimage site was sufficient for attaining ritual purity. The vision-­centrism of theology generated new systems of architecture and painting that emphasized the liquescence of water by framing a view of the river Yamuna. This hydroaesthetics of art and architecture developed in an era marked by the death of five million people from El Niño– induced droughts. Land encompasses the alchemic, talismanic, and agentive nature of stone. In sixteenth-­century texts, Govardhan, a sandstone ridge in Braj rich in feldspar, mica, calcite, and opaque minerals, was reconfigured as an embodied lithic form of Krishna himself. The vibrant materiality of this specific ridge was linked to the materiality of temples constructed with the same sandstone, along with the emergence of a new temple style in Braj that was based on conceptualizations of the earth as divine geobody, a living being that bled if wounded.

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Forests had been extensively reclaimed for agriculture by the 1750s in Braj, drastically transforming the region’s fragile ecosystem. How did the topophilic theology of venerating natural phenomena contend with this sweeping alteration of the agrolandscape? Eighteenth-­century paintings and temple architecture reveal the unfolding of a vegetal aesthetic of plants, vines, and flowers in Braj. As deforestation accelerated in the region, the surfaces of paintings and temple façades became more elaborately ornamented with floral imagery. Here, ornament was not merely decorative or allegorical but an episteme that connected lived practices with visual form. Eighteenth-­century architecture embellished with extravagant vegetal motifs also inaugurated a design idiom that continued well into the nineteenth century, reaffirming the efficacy of this new vegetal aesthetics in a larger north Indian world. Ether, the fifth element in Vaishnava philosophy, connects the infinitesimal with the galactic. Within it, the materiality of rivers, hills, and forests exist in a state of multi-­vectored fluidity. Completed immediately after the last droughts of the Little Ice Age, the natural element of ether (akasa) is central to the 1868 Shahji Temple in Vrindavan. Citing British neoclassical architecture, earlier Islamic form, and Baroque columns made famous by Bernini’s bronze baldachin in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, the 1868 temple ushers in yet another architectural paradigm that dialogically connects colonial cultural ecologies to the ecologies of effervescent cosmic matter. Intersections between the local and the global enables a visualization of akasa as an architectural praxis situated in space but expansive in vision. After the catastrophes of the Little Ice Age, through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, colonial photography, pilgrimage maps, and votive paintings of Braj reveal further interplay between matter and life. As a transcript of the aesthetics of such entanglements, geoaesthetics unmoors art history’s epistemological scope, given the anthropocentric exceptionalism that is allocated by art history to the conceptual category called the human. Eco art history is the name of that which we stand to gain from this unmooring.

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one | water The river Sarasvati purifies one after three days. The river Narmada purifies one after seven weeks. The Ganga purifies one immediately. Yamuna purifies one who beholds it.—Haribhaktivil¯asa (Performance of Devotion to Hari)

Cutting diagonally across the picture plane, the blue river flows beyond the border of the painting to a space elsewhere, a space that is conceivably beyond representation (figure 1.1). It is the transversal movement of the fleeting diagonal, more than the height of the vertical or the repose of the horizontal, that allows for the precipitous passage of the river through Braj, the bucolic site where the divine Krishna is believed to have spent his youth. A visual translation of a verse from the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, a text that became central to sixteenth-­century Vaishnava praxis in Braj, the painting illustrates Krishna’s amorous play in the river Yamuna with the cowherd women (gopis) of Braj devoted to the lord.1 Tired from the pleasures of love, Krishna—who has lost all inhibitions—enters the water of the flowing river with his beloved devotees. Thus begins the jal krida, the water sport. “With looks of love, the young women around Him laughed and splashed Him vigorously, O King! Worshipped with showers of kusuma flowers by the celestial beings in their aerial chariots, Kṛṣṇa disported himself like an elephant in līlā [play] pastimes, even though he is content within himself.”2 Surrounded by cowherd women, the bejeweled body of Krishna flows with the turbulent undercurrent of the river toward an arena beyond the yellow margin that marks the limit of the painting, the limit of representation itself. The artists’ deliberate transgression of the bounded borders of the folio has not gone unnoticed by art history.3 The paintings in the ca. 1560–70 manuscript, now known as the Isarda Bhāgavata Purāṇa, have become, for art historians, exemplary of a new visual language that emerged in response to pictorial conventions developed in the imperial atelier under the Mughal emperor Akbar. 25

1.1. Krishna’s water sport, Isarda Bha¯gavata Pura¯n.a, ca. 1560–70. Opaque watercolor on paper, 18.8 × 25.2 cm. Repository: The San Diego Museum of Art, Edwin Binney 3rd Collection, 1990.586. Photo courtesy The San Diego Museum of Art.

The innovative use of delicate white lines to demarcate the turbulent waves of flowing water and the disregard for pictorial margins in the manuscript also appear in contemporaneous paintings produced in the Mughal court.4 The Isarda Bhāgavata, then, becomes decisive for mapping the sweeping transformations in painterly cultures in South Asia that ensued in the sixteenth century with the establishment of the Mughal empire. Indeed, a number of folios from this manuscript seem to have used an analogous visual strategy, one that was organized around highlighting the aqueous dynamism of flowing water while accentuating the river within the picture plane.5 Yet the act of reading this new imaginative technique of representing water solely as an outcome of Central Asian Timurid aesthetic regimes introduced by the Mughals in north India also serves to idealize the landscape as a system of representation that occludes linkages between the natural environment and human action upon it. The Isarda Bhāgavata, however, is not a closed discourse, significant only for the history of the art of the Indian subcontinent. 26  chap ter one

Rather, the act of delineating the volatility of water in the manuscript was materialized within a matrix that encompassed aesthetic practices, natural-­ resource management, and environmental catastrophes that occurred with the inception of the Little Ice Age. Alongside the climatic upheavals of the Little Ice Age, the mid-­sixteenth century also saw the emergence of a new theology in Braj based on venerating the natural environment. Flowing beyond the confines of paper, the river Yamuna in the Isarda folio thus allowed for the formation of a visual horizon that highlighted seeing the fluid materiality of water as an aesthetic experience. Undoubtedly, the rendering of the river in the folio had its visual genealogies in the painterly cultures of the Mughal court. But at the same time, the painting offers critical perspectives on an incipient mid-­sixteenth-­century opticality that underscored the act of seeing water in an age of massive droughts. The political, economic, and cultural significance of water has certainly received significant attention in recent years. From Braudel’s foundational La Méditerranée to more recent histories that have emphasized the inherent connectedness that constituted the early modern period, the fluidity of water as a liquid that links landmasses through trade and migration has become fundamental in shaping the horizons of global histories.6 At the same time, scholars have studied riparian architecture, canals, port cities, hydrological projects, drainage systems, aqueducts, fountains, gardens, water vessels, and scientific experiments that have harnessed the force of water.7 Recent scholarship has further examined the history of watercolor as a medium that employs the volatility of water as substance or the ecological consciousness in contemporary environmental art that takes water as its site of experimentation.8 But when we bring together the visual and the natural environment, what did it mean to see water? In sixteenth-­century north India, theoretical developments and experimentations in the field of vision led to the growing popularization of spectacles, while encyclopedic treatises composed in the Mughal court, for instance Muhammad Fazil Miskin Samarqandi’s Pearls of Sciences Composed for Humayun (Jawāhir ul-­‘Ulūm Hūmāyūni; ca. 1539), deliberated on optics and alchemy.9 Within the sixteenth-­century ecumenical worlds of Vaishnava piety, the act of seeing accrued further philosophical and theological density. The Vaishnava reformer Chaitanya’s disciple Rupa Goswami (ca. 1489–ca. 1564) thus writes in The Ocean of the Essence of Devotional Rasa (Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu; 1541), “O Lord, regarding even the knowers of Brahman, can the experience of the highest Self possibly be higher or more beneficial than that intense delight caused by a direct vision of you?”10 The vision-­centric religious aesthetic proposed by Vaishnava theologians such as Rupa Goswami in Braj emerged from a reformulation of the theory of rasa (a mode of experiencing aesthetic enjoyment) to articulate a new devotional culture based on the experience of loving Krishna.11 According to sixteenth-­ century Vaishnava texts, the act of “seeing” the divine Krishna had the power water  27

to fundamentally transform the beholder. The popularization of a new form of Vaishnavism in Braj in this period thus created a vocabulary of religiosity in which yearning for Krishna as a lover became the ideal form of bhakti, or devotion. Hence, in her lyrical songs of devotion, Mirabai (fl. 1516–46), a bhakti poet and Krishna devotee who is believed to have visited Braj, wrote: Friend, my eyes have been hit by the arrow of love. His sweet form has taken over my thoughts and pierced my heart to the depths. Friend, my eyes are acting so strangely . . . How long have I been standing here in this house, gazing down the road? Friend, my eyes have been hit by the arrow of love. The dear Dark Lover [Krishna] is my breath, The root, the source of my life. Friend, my eyes are acting so strangely . . . Mira is sold into the hands of the Mountain Bearer [Krishna]. People say she has lost her mind.12 Moving away from earlier orthodox practices of venerating Krishna as a supreme warrior god, this new liturgy of bhakti allowed for the articulation of an emotional devotion centered on vision. Theologians proposed that faith (sraddha) and ritualistic practice (sadhana) would eventually allow the devotee to directly perceive (sakshat) Krishna to attain transcendental bliss. As a religious aesthete, the devotee of Krishna was thus expected to inculcate the erotic love (sringara rasa) of the cowherd women through play with Krishna in the groves and forests of Braj. Only after attaining bliss in the worldly Braj could the devotee access transcendent Braj as a partaker in perpetual play, or lila, with the Supreme Being. Vaishnava theologians delineated four forms through which the Supreme Being appears in this world as embodied: in scriptural texts such as the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, through the aural presence of Krishna’s name uttered, in the geographic space of Braj, and in the icon worshipped in the temple.13 It appears that the development of this new Vaishnava theology in Braj from the mid-­sixteenth century onward, alongside the production of remarkable illustrated manuscripts narrating Krishna’s life and large-­scale riparian religious architecture, paralleled the increasing frequency of El Niño–induced droughts in the region. With the climatic phenomenon of the Little Ice Age, the climate of the middle latitudes had generally become harsher by the mid-­ sixteenth century.14 In West Africa, the Sahel, the dry frontier of the Saharan fringe, pushed southward in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, causing a series of calamitous droughts.15 In Mexico, catastrophic droughts of great intensity occurred between 1545 and 1580.16 From 1554 onward, the frequency of droughts increased in South Asia, with the worst catastrophe ensuing in 1630, when five million people died.17 Traveling to Agra from western India 28  chap ter one

in November 1630, the Cornish merchant Peter Mundy wrote, “[A]ll the high way was strowed with dead people, Our noses never free of the Stinck of them, especially about Townes; for they dragg them out by the heeles starke naked, of all ages and sexes, till they are out of the gates, and there they are lefte, soe that the way is halfe barred upp.”18 Thus, in the wake of a climatic catastrophe that severely unsettled the political, religious, and cultural milieu of north India, the act of seeing water took on a specific symbolic and aesthetic meaning. The sweeping rearrangement of both the natural and the built environment in early modern Braj consequently provides a distinct perspective to the reciprocal relationship between climate change and artistic practice. Emerging from the interstices of creative interventions, religious cultures, and extensive environmental transformation, paintings and architecture produced in Braj also present us with an exemplary site to explore an ideation of an eco art history. In such an ideation, the act of seeing water becomes the crucial link that connects localized liturgical aesthetics with an expanded transterritorial arena of water scarcity and drought. Natural form—rising water, changing banks, altering flows, water currents, riparian habitat—was then not just a system of the environment but an affective text performing a theological and aesthetic function. Within such a configuration, the river was neither a natural given nor purely a construction of human experience. Rather, as non-­different from the unmanifest world where Krishna plays eternally, the river was a liminal arena that was simultaneously manifest (prakata, worldly) and unmanifest (aprakata, transcendent). Conceivably, it is in part this theological coterminity of the manifest and the unmanifest, the visible and the invisible, that led the artists of the Isarda Bhāgavata to trace the journey of the river Yamuna diagonally across the picture plane to a place elsewhere, the aprakata beyond presence and representation. One could then contend that the aesthetic experience of seeing the flowing Yamuna in Braj allowed the viewer-­devotee to construe an immersive relation between her or his body, physical land, and ideational space. This particular kind of representational and architectural convention can best be described as a form of hydroaesthetics. From the depiction of the river Yamuna in a single folio of the Isarda Bhāgavata Purāṇa to monumental riparian architecture, hydroaesthetics, in this specific instance, intrinsically interconnected art and architecture practices to an expanded, nonhuman, transterritorial arena of water scarcity and drought. This interconnectedness opens up new passages in art history, ecological passages that bring to the forefront a reciprocal relationship between climate change and acts of visualizing water.

Hydroaesthetics in the Little Ice Age, ca. 1560–1570 Discovered in the collection of the landed estate of Isarda, sixty miles south of the city of Jaipur in contemporary Rajasthan, the ca. 1560–70 Bhāgavata Purāṇa water  29

is undeniably a significant manuscript in the history of painting in South Asia. Produced in the Mathura-­Agra region, the twenty-­three extant folios from the manuscript depict events from Krishna’s life, which were narrated in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa’s tenth book.19 Crucially, paintings in the manuscript, when read alongside contemporaneous riparian architecture and Vaishnava aesthetics, provide a deeper history of seeing water as a form of beholding that foregrounds the riverscape within a world of affective aesthetics and the large-­scale rearrangement of the natural environment that occurred alongside the severe droughts that ensued in 1554. Although coeval, there is no evidence that these two moments—one environmental and the other artistic—are causally connected. Conceivably, it was water as affect—that is, the connection between droughts in South Asia and the affective responses to it—that intimately bound them. Indeed, in the wake of a succession of extensive droughts that occurred with the commencing of the Little Ice Age, Vishram Ghat in Mathura, the principal ghat for pilgrimage in Braj, became the locus of a number of architecture projects that made seeing the flowing Yamuna central to an appreciation of water (figure 1.2). Ghats, or platforms beside waterbodies with steps that provide access to the water, are characteristically built for domestic use. In pilgrimage sites such as Braj, ghats are also used for liturgical purposes. Given the powerful symbolism of the river Yamuna as the daughter of the sun god Surya, Vishram Ghat in Mathura, a town that had become the epicenter of pilgrimage in Braj, had already functioned as a site for solar worship prior to the thirteenth century.20 Pre-­sixteenth-­century architecture at Vishram Ghat, however, is not extant. But sixteenth-­century pilgrimage manuals assert that this ghat was the precise location where Krishna rested after killing his evil uncle Kamsa;21 hence the name Vishram Ghat, the “ghat of rest.” From other accounts, we learn that Sikandar Lodi, the Afghan ruler of Delhi from 1489 to 1517, had allegedly erected a mechanical contraption to prevent pilgrims from performing customary rituals at Vishram Ghat.22 Seventeenth-­ century sectarian literature narrates that the device erected by Sikandar Lodi would result in pilgrims sprouting a beard when they attempted to perform rituals there. Other narratives insinuate that Sikandar Lodi had assembled a machine at Vishram Ghat that automatically circumcised Hindus who went there. In retaliation, the Vaishnava reformer Vallabha drew a cosmogram (yantra) on a piece of paper and gave it to his followers, asking them to hang it above one of the main gates at Sikandar Lodi’s capital in Delhi. As a result of the spell, Muslims who passed under the gate lost their beards. A repentant Sikandar Lodi then removed the contraption. Veracity notwithstanding, such accounts suggest that the control of Mathura, an urban center located at the entrance to the fertile Gangetic plains, was vital for control over the riverine system, which by this time had become crucial for the trade route connecting northern and western India to Bengal and beyond.23 30  chap ter one

1.2. Vishram Ghat, Mathura.

It was also during the reign of Sikander Lodi that Vaishnava reformers such as Chaitanya and Vallabha arrived in Mathura. Sectarian literature informs us that after arriving in Braj in 1514, Chaitanya embarked on a mission to discover the sacred sites of Braj from Vishram Ghat itself. He embraced trees and creepers, collapsed in ecstasy on seeing embodied land, and leaped into the dark blue waters of the Yamuna, imagining Krishna perpetually playing in the river.24 The performative piety of Chaitanya’s pilgrimage was thus centered on a bodily experience of natural phenomena. This mode of experiencing the topos, however, had resonances in the late ninth-­or early tenth-­century Bhāgavata Purāṇa, where Uddhava, Krishna’s closest companion, took aesthetic pleasure in seeing the Yamuna, the forests, and the blossoming trees of Braj.25 Uddhava then wished to be reborn as a creeper in Braj so that the feet of devotees and the dust of Braj would cover him in rapturous love. In this sense, the sixteenth-­century reclaiming of Vishram Ghat during Sikandar Lodi’s reign was grounded on a theological claim to space as embodied. Very soon, Vaishnava devotees, especially the Kachhwaha rulers from the kingdom of Amber in contemporary Rajasthan, built a series of structures at water  31

1.3. Sati Burj, Mathura, 1570.

Vishram Ghat.26 The only extant structure from this period, however, is Sati Burj, a 16.7-­meter quadrangular tower constructed by Bhagwantdas (r. 1573/4– 89), the ruler of Amber, in 1570 (figure 1.3). Bhagwantdas was not only one of Akbar’s closest allies but the patron of a key temple in Braj.27 Constructed in red sandstone, the same material concurrently being used by Akbar to build Mughal capitals in Agra (1565–ca. 1571) and Fatehpur Sikri (ca. 1571–85), the monumental verticality of Sati Burj in Mathura, along with its Mughal materiality, would certainly have visually charged the spatial fabric of the ghat. Although the 32  chap ter one

1.4. The riverfront, Mathura. Chunni Lall & Co., Muttra [Mathura], ca. 1890. 27.9 × 30.4 cm. Repository: Radha Gopinath Temple Archive, Vrindavan.

structure is now partially hidden by the extensive twentieth-­century build-­up by the riverfront, late nineteenth-­century photographs of Mathura by Chunni Lall & Co., a prominent studio in the city, illustrate the soaring, four-­story tower offsetting the horizontality of the flowing Yamuna, hinting at the immense symbolic power that the structure must have commanded in the sixteenth century (figure 1.4).28 It is worth noting that Sati Burj in Mathura and the Isarda Bhāgavata Purāṇa manuscript were contemporaneous. Both the sandstone structure and the painted folios in the Isarda manuscript reveal an attempt to engage with the visual form of the river Yamuna, particularly as it could be seen from the ghats of Braj. Indeed, a window-­like opening on the upper level of the tower may have functioned as a viewing portal to see the Yamuna as it flowed past Vishram Ghat (figure 1.5). Bhagwantdas’ predecessor, Ratan Singh (r. 1537–48), had also built a “ten-­pillared” palace for royal pilgrimage beside Vishram Ghat.29 Not a single trace of the palace remains, but descriptions imply that the structure provided a suitable viewing gallery for the Amber court. The role of seeing in engendering spatial perception was key to the tower’s iconographic program. One enters Sati Burj through a doorway flanked by talismanic diagrams (yantras) carved in stone. Frequently depicted on temple walls, ritualistic cosmograms were characteristically used as visual aids for water  33

1.5. Upper level, Sati Burj, Mathura, 1570.

meditation or were considered to possess astrological and magical benefits.30 On the right side of the gateway is the five-­pointed star (pancakona yantra) that symbolizes the five material elements (mahabhuta) of ether, air, fire, water, and earth (figure 1.6). In the heart of the diagram is a schematic lotus symbolizing the pilgrimage center of Braj. According to Gaudiya Vaishnava literature, Krishna and his consort Radha occupy the epicenter of the lotus, and devotees use illustrations of this celestial terrain as a visual device for concentration during meditative practices.31 The talismanic diagram could at the same time be read as a pictorial representation of Chaitanya and his four closest disciples, who together were the five metaphysical elements (pancatattva) as well as the five pillars of Gaudiya Vaishnavism.32 Hagiographic accounts inform us that Chaitanya had brought liturgical manuscripts to Braj that discussed talismanic diagrams as meditative devices.33 Thus, the depiction of such ritualized diagrams on architectural surfaces in Braj would not be out of place. Framed by a miniature gateway and two elephants, the diagram as an apotropaic schema was unquestionably intended to be seen ritualistically. The visual language of the tower had two distinct sources. The decoration, especially the use of archways (torana) as a motif, as well as its vertical emphasis, had its source in pre-­Mughal architecture. We see repeating archways, for 34  chap ter one

1.6. Talismanic diagram (pancakona yantra), façade, Sati Burj, Mathura, 1570.

instance, on the façade of the ca. 1500 Gwalior fort in central India, built by the Tomar ruler Man Singh (r. 1486–1516; figure 1.7). The well-­known Chittor tower, a nine-­story structure completed by the Sisodia dynasty in contemporary Rajasthan in the fifteenth century, is likewise an easily recognizable visual source. Similar freestanding archways were subsequently built near Sati Burj. At the same time, the use of imperial Mughal red sandstone, projecting eaves supported by decorated brackets, and the limited use of anthropomorphic imagery indicate that Sati Burj was designed using architectural typologies popularized by Akbar at the Mughal capital concurrently being constructed in Fatehpur Sikri, presently a suburb of Agra thirty miles south of Mathura (figure 1.8). Indeed, the construction of Sati Burj in Mathura and construction at the Mughal capital in Fatehpur Sikri commenced in 1570 and 1571, respectively, making these two architectural projects contemporaneous. The persistent evocation of red sandstone, the stone being employed to build Akbar’s fort-­ palaces, within the soteriological space of sixteenth-­century Braj thus suggests that practices of imagining the pilgrimage center involved seeing space, not just through a metaphysical order but also as construed through contemporaneous expressions of political power. While red sandstone quarried in the region had been extensively used in the early centuries of the Common Era, water  35

1.7. (Above) Façade, Man Mandir, Gwalior, ca. 1500. 1.8. (Right) Private Audience Hall (Diwan-i Khass), Fatehpur Sikri, ca. 1571.

36  chap ter one

1.9. Public Viewing Window (jharoka) in Records Office (Daftarkhana), Fatehpur Sikri, ca. 1574–75. Photo courtesy Michael Brand, courtesy Aga Khan Documentation Center at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

the considerable hiatus in art production in the late medieval period implies that the new mid-­sixteenth-­century structures were being built in negotiation with the concomitant Mughal convention of using red sandstone (see figures 1.12 and 2.2). By the eighteenth century, most temples in Braj would be constructed with a fine-­grained beige sandstone, also extracted from adjacent quarries, drastically departing from a two-­hundred-­year tradition of using red sandstone (see figure 4.3). This was not a coincidence. The extensive use of red sandstone for temple construction between the 1550s and the 1750s, a period that also witnessed the highpoint of the Mughal empire, suggests a deliberate choice on the part of patrons and architects in Braj to adopt Mughal architectural conventions. The homology between the Mughal capital in Fatehpur Sikri and the Amber court’s Sati Burj in Mathura persists throughout the tower’s architecture program. Akbar, for instance, used a viewing window (jharoka) to ceremonially present himself to his subjects in his palace complex in Fatehpur Sikri. The imperial public viewing window (figure 1.9) was built in the 1570s in a structure water  37

that might have functioned as the royal records office (Daftarkhana). It has been argued that Akbar derived this custom of displaying the imperial body from Hindu liturgical practices that prescribed the act of seeing and being seen by the divine body (darsan)—an exchange of glances with the icon in a temple—as a form of gaining merit.34 Along with the shared material of local red sandstone, the two viewing windows—one in an imperial Mughal palace and the other in an adjacent Hindu pilgrimage site—were buttressed by similar bracketed supports that had already been used in earlier structures patronized by Akbar, such as the wrongly named Jahangiri Mahal (Jahangir’s Palace; ca. 1565) in the Agra fort.35 While Akbar’s palace complexes in Agra and Fatehpur Sikri were a synthesis of Timurid typologies and western and central Indian architecture styles employed in structures such as the ca. 1500 fort complex in Gwalior, it was this innovative Mughal systemization that was prominently cited in Sati Burj in Mathura. In the Mughal context, Akbar could be seen as having adopted the vision-­ centric practices intrinsic to Hindu liturgy to enunciate the idealized sovereign body. The use of the viewing window at Vishram Ghat, however, presents a somewhat different sensibility of vision and the gaze. For unlike the imperial jharoka in Fatehpur Sikri, designed to be looked into from the outside, the positioning of the viewing window on the upper level of Sati Burj implies that it functioned as an optical apparatus to look out of and behold the Yamuna flowing past Vishram Ghat. Located almost fifteen meters above ground level, the viewing window of Sati Burj could not have served as a framing device to gaze upon the members of the Amber court from the streets of Mathura. Instead, it provided an unhindered view of flowing water, underscoring the role of beholding the Yamuna as fundamental to pilgrimage practices at Vishram Ghat. Sati Burj thus functioned within multiple semantic fields. On the one hand was the unambiguous citation of Mughal architecture systems. On the other hand, the viewing window enabled a logic of vision that was grounded in the modalities of pilgrimage practices at Vishram Ghat. What emerges from this doubling is not a displacement of one system by another but a sufficiently fluid schemata that could potentially accommodate diverse but interlaced practices, meanings, and inferences. Given that the patron of Sati Burj was a close ally of Akbar, the structure conceivably referred to Mughal architecture to articulate a politics of affinity while concurrently engaging with the vision-­centric religious aesthetics formulated by Vaishnava theologians in Braj. It is within this culture of intersecting homologies that we must also place the Isarda Bhāgavata Purāṇa manuscript. The Isarda manuscript was only one in a series of illustrated manuscripts produced in this region in the sixteenth century. A ca. 1520–40 Bhāgavata Purāṇa from Palam, now a suburb in southwest Delhi, with over two hundred extant folios, signals toward the larger artistic cultures that had developed in the mercantile worlds of sixteenth-­century 38  chap ter one

1.10. Krishna’s water sport, Palam Bha¯gavata Pura¯n.a, ca. 1520–40. Ink and color on paper, 16.50 × 22.20 cm. Repository: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alvin N. Haas, 1971.171. Photo © The Cleveland Museum of Art.

Delhi, Mathura, and Agra, alongside new Vaishnava devotional and pilgrimage practices that had profoundly transformed the north Indian ecumene in this period (figure 1.10).36 Commissioned by two Vaishnava merchants, the Palam Bhāgavata provides us with an apposite point of comparison to the Isarda manuscript that was produced only a few decades later. As one of the earliest known illustrations of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, the Palam manuscript can be placed within a specific fifteenth-­and early sixteenth-­century painting tradition that had evolved in this region. Indeed, along with the Palam Bhāgavata, a number of contemporaneous manuscripts shared an aesthetic sensibility characterized by the use of flat monochromatic bands to delineate the background, angular figures in silhouette profile, and compartmentalized units bordered by solid lines.37 This new artistic sensibility has been provisionally designated as the early Rajput School.38 Water occupies a significant place in a number of folios in the Palam Bhāgavata. In a folio depicting the jal krida (water sport), we see Krishna with the cowherd women of Braj in the river Yamuna. Working with a limited water  39

palette of colors, the artist has carefully contrasted bands of intense reds and blues to draw the viewer’s attention toward the river, which occupies the central place within the picture plane. Crucially, color is also used effectively to delineate spatial division between the worldly Braj and the divine realm from whence celestial beings shower Krishna with floral wreaths. Unlike the painting illustrating the same verse in the 1560–70 Isarda Bhāgavata folio, the folio with which our discussion on water ensued, the Palam artist seems to have maintained veracity in his visual translation of the verse. Consequently, along with the presence of celestial beings, Krishna, in a moment of amorous impulse, reaches out to his devotee. Krishna, as the Bhāgavata Purāṇa states, “was like the king of the elephants who had lost all inhibitions with his female elephants” during the water sport.39 In the Palam folio, the river Yamuna is depicted in a characteristic fifteenth-­ and early sixteenth-­century basketwork pattern with clearly marked white parallel lines against deep blue water. The technique of mobilizing parallel lines to indicate flowing water has a long history in South Asia, one that can be traced back to as early as the first century BCE. A narrative relief on the eastern gateway of the Great Stupa in Sanchi, for instance, depicts the miracle of the Buddha walking on water (figure 1.11). The turbulent waves of the flooded river in the relief are also represented with repeating parallel lines. A first-­century CE relief sculpture from Mathura, ninety miles south of Palam where the manuscript under discussion was produced, depicts the child Krishna being carried by his father to the house of his foster parents (figure 1.12). While there is some debate about the precise identification of the narrative, here too we find the use of parallel lines to visualize the river.40 It would be difficult to ascertain whether the artists of the Palam Bhāgavata were aware of this particular convention of depicting water from the early centuries of the Common Era. But by the fifteenth century, the passage from stone to paper had already occurred in Vaishnava aesthetic cultures. A late fifteenth-­ century manuscript illustrating the poet Bilvamangala’s Praise for the Young Lord of the Cowherds (Bālagopālastuti) shows Krishna, attended by cowherd women, lifting Govardhan hill (figure 1.13). As one of the earliest representations of narratives from Krishna’s life in painting, fifteenth-­century illustrated manuscripts of the Praise for the Young Lord of the Cowherds from western India foreshadowed the new aesthetic cultures of what is now designated as the early Rajput School.41 Notably, the river Yamuna in the folio flows across the lower edge of the painting. The river mirrors the contours of the hill that the young Krishna lifts to protect the inhabitants of Braj from the torrential rain sent by Indra, the king of gods. The undulating lines of the river and the hill operate as a powerful framing device to allow the viewer-­devotee to contemplate Krishna’s miraculous act. Water, simultaneously threatening and lifesaving, is central to this narrative. On the one hand, Krishna shelters Braj from torrential rain that threatens to flood the riverbanks, potentially inundating 40  chap ter one

1.11. The miracle of walking on the waters. East gateway pillar, Great Stupa, Sanchi, ca. 50–25 BCE. 1.12. Vasudeva carrying Krishna across the Yamuna, ca. first century CE. Sandstone, 43 cm (height). Repository: Government Museum, Mathura, 17.1344.

water  41

1.13. Krishna lifting Govardhan hill. Folio 58 Verso, Bilvamangala’s Ba¯lagopa¯lastuti, late fifteenth century. Opaque watercolor on paper, 10.79 × 23.5 cm. Repository: Wellcome Library, London, MS Indic alpha 1226. Photo courtesy Wellcome Library.

the villages in the region. On the other hand, it is the river Yamuna, marked by rapid parallel lines, that is the primary water source sustaining the agricultural and pastoral communities of Braj. This hydrosocial imaginary played an equally important role in structuring the folio of the Isarda Bhāgavata manuscript. The prominence of the river and its role in governing the visual narrative, however, distinguishes the Isarda folio. The vital role of water in supporting the ecologies of life may have made the Yamuna central to the aesthetic, religious, and cultural practices of sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century north India. Thus, even as the central theme of the narrative is Krishna’s water sport, it seems that the Isarda artist has deliberately used pictorial configurations to draw the viewer’s attention to the blue river with lotuses, blooming creepers facing the waterfront, and frolicking cattle. The blue of Krishna’s body blends into the liquescent blue of the river, making it difficult to discern the separation between the river and the divine body. Carefully tilting the pictorial plane to create a sense of spatial recession, the artist draws the viewer’s attention to the Yamuna, which is flowing diagonally in a wide swath along a central axis and across the surface of the painting. The implication of this visual innovation becomes legible if we compare the 1560–70 Isarda folio with the 1520–40 Palam Bhāgavata folio. Following pre-­ sixteenth-­century conventions, the river in the Palam folio functions like a flat decorative background or a theatrical backdrop in front of which the narrative is played out. While poetic tropes such as the presence of waterfowl and 42  chap ter one

blooming lotuses point toward a shared vocabulary of envisioning the natural environment, the Yamuna’s movement from the background to the very center of the picture plane in the Isarda manuscript, it appears, transpired in a matter of only thirty years. A dense cluster of philosophical ruminations, theological aesthetics, and pilgrimage practices directed the optical cognizance that structured this visual rearrangement. The Isarda manuscript’s significance in art history, however, has primarily rested on the artist’s attempt to bridge pre-­Mughal aesthetic conventions with the emerging repertoire of the Mughal atelier under Akbar. The artist’s use of delicate white lines to demarcate the turbulent waves of the Yamuna has been seen as emerging in negotiation with the growing prominence of Mughal painting in the mid-­sixteenth century. One sees a similar mode of depicting the swirling fluidity of flowing water in the History of Hamza (Hamzanāma), a manuscript commissioned by the emperor Akbar around 1562, within six years of ascending the Mughal throne. The fourteen volumes of the imperial manuscript, each with one hundred paintings, were completed over the next fifteen years.42 A folio from the manuscript depicting the prophet Elias rescuing Hamza’s nephew, Nur al-­Dahr, from the sea makes perceptible both the formal and psychological potential of water as it was imagined in the Mughal atelier (figure 1.14). The delicate strokes of white paint seem to indicate the translucence of cresting wind-­driven waves, while sea monsters threaten the doomed Nur al-­Dahr. It is the ungovernable power of menacing water that the Mughal artist apprehends through curved lines indicating the tempestuous waves of the sea. This fluid vitality of turbulent water was also central to the imagination of the river Yamuna flowing through Braj in the Isarda Bhāgavata, a manuscript that was produced within a decade of Akbar’s commissioning of the imperial History of Hamza. The compositional and stylistic differences between the 1520–40 Palam and the 1560–70 Isarda Bhāgavata were conceivably informed by the new aesthetic regimes introduced by Mughal artists in the interim. But an eco art history necessitates that we simultaneously correlate this new mid-­sixteenth-­century practice of visualizing water to both transformations in the natural environment and a new philosophy of place that underscored a topographic theology based on venerating the environment as a manifestation of divine form. In sixteenth-­century Vaishnava texts, the river Yamuna, for instance, had accrued a connotation as the sensual drops of sweat that emerge during Krishna’s lovemaking with his devotees.43 Thus, along with other symbolic associations, Yamuna was now also ecstatic love in liquid form. The sacramental, aesthetic, and environmental affect of the river Yamuna was eulogized in contemporaneous liturgical texts, such as the Yamunāṣṭakam, a sixteenth-­century Sanskrit hymn dedicated to the river by the Vaishnava reformer Vallabha. The hymn ends with the praise, “Through you, all spiritual powers are attained, and Krishna is delighted. You completely transform the nature of your devotees.”44 water  43

1.14. The prophet Elias (Elijah) rescuing Hamza’s nephew, Prince Nur ad-Dahr. Hamzana¯ma, ca. 1562–77. Gouache on cotton, 68 × 52 cm. Repository: The British Museum, London, 00030552001 © The Trustees of the British Museum. Photo courtesy British Museum.

44  chap ter one

For Vallabha, the Yamuna’s material or external form (adhibhautika rupa), on the one hand, expanded the liquescence of water to seep into a multi-­sensorial experience of the natural ecosystem that encompassed sand on the river banks that glistened like the lotus feet of Krishna, the melodic sound of peacocks, parrots, and swans, and sweet-­smelling flowers that adorned the lush forests on the river’s banks. Vallabha writes: Joyously I honour Yamuna, the source of all spiritual power. Her expansive sands shine as bright as the lotus feet of Krishna. Her waters are fragrant with lovely flowers from the lush forests on her banks. She bears the radiance of Krishna, Father of Cupid, Who is worshipped by both humble and assertive lovers.45 The river’s internal form (adhidaivika svarupa) was, on the other hand, for Vallabha, the divine goddess who steered souls into the mystical world of bhakti. Depicting the Yamuna, paintings in the Isarda Bhāgavata consequently appear to valorize beholding water as a theological aesthetic, a form of non-­ anthropomorphic hydrolatry, which did not disentangle nature from culture. The act of seeing the sacred river in the Isarda Bhāgavata thus encompassed the riparian ecosystem to include plant life that rendered the river fragrant, cows that gathered by the water, and monsoon clouds as dark as the water itself. At a remove from Krishna’s divine sport, a woman carries water from the Yamuna in earthen pots, perhaps for domestic use (figure 1.15). Unlike the dramaturgical staging of the riverscape in the Palam manuscript, the Isarda Bhāgavata makes visible the everyday life that surrounds river systems as an imaginative geoaesthetic topography. Alongside new aesthetic systems and artistic styles introduced by Mughal artists in albums such as the History of Hamza, the image of expansive water in the Isarda manuscript was perhaps also materialized and shaped by both its theological manifestation and an ensemble of hydrosocial practices played out in and by the river that flows some eight hundred and sixty miles from the glacial formations of the Himalayas to its confluence with the river Ganga and the fabled river Sarasvati in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh. Significantly, this new mode of delineating the Yamuna transpired in the wake of massive droughts that devastated north India. Lasting between 1554 and 1556, the first of these droughts, which would continue well into the eighteenth century, ensued with the failure of the monsoon.46 Writing on the drought of 1556, Abu’l-­Fazl, Akbar’s panegyrist and close companion, noted, “There was a terrible famine in many parts, and especially in the province of Delhi. Though they were finding signs of gold, they could see no trace of corn. Men took to eating one another; some would join together and carry off a solitary man, and make him their food.”47 Describing the famine as khashm-­i-­ izad, divine wrath, ‘Abd al-­Qadir Bada’uni, an eyewitness to the devastation in water  45

1.15. Detail, Krishna’s water sport. Isarda Bha¯gavata Pura¯n.a, ca. 1560–70. Opaque watercolor on paper, 18.8 × 25.2 cm. Repository: The San Diego Museum of Art, Edwin Binney 3rd Collection, 1990.586. Photo courtesy The San Diego Museum of Art.

the region, likewise rhetorically asserted that the “scarcity of rain, and shortness of grain” led to “man eating his fellow-­man.”48 While apocryphal accounts of cannibalism during climatic catastrophes abound in early modern narratives, Mughal records indicate that the droughts between 1554 and 1556 had indeed led to a crisis in the availability of food crops. That the elite of north India, too, were affected becomes apparent in the Mughal courtier Abu’l-­Fazl’s grievance that during the scarcity, his family of seventy could only obtain a seer (two pounds) of grain, “which was set to boil in earthenware vessels, and the warm water distributed.”49 It is at this point, within approximately four years of the 1556 drought, that we see the artists of the Isarda Bhāgavata visualizing a system of representing the materiality of the river Yamuna that exceeded a hydrology that disciplines, measures, and subordinates water’s geological force. The natural undoubtedly shaped the aesthetic. But such a reading would have to proceed with caution. 46  chap ter one

As products of very different dynamisms, the linkages between painting practices and droughts should offer neither a deterministic history of the environment’s agency nor a reductionist non-­anthropocentric history of art. Rather, a transversal movement from the optical sensibility made visible in the Isarda Bhāgavata to the natural environment, and vice versa, could perhaps offer a relational field that foregrounds the political, social, theological, and aesthetic imperatives of seeing water.50 Both these episodes led to a new hydroaesthetics centered on water systems.

The Topography of Hydroaesthetics in the Seventeenth Century By the early seventeenth century, the growing popularization of Braj led to an exponential increase in patronage at the pilgrimage site. The early seventeenth century also saw the construction of a series of ghats facing the Yamuna in Braj that appears to have concretized both the metaphysical and the everyday function of the river within a particular hydroaesthetic arrangement. Much of this construction, however, occurred under the shadow of continuing droughts and monsoon failures. From 1613 onward, the intensity of droughts greatly surpassed the devastation caused by the natural catastrophes of the earlier century that we have discussed thus far.51 Describing the 1613–15 drought that was followed by a bubonic plague that lasted for eight years, the Mughal emperor Nuruddin Muhammad Jahangir (1569–1627), who ascended the throne in 1605 after Akbar’s death, writes: [A] great pestilence appeared in several places in Hindustan. The epidemic began in the Punjab countryside and spread little by little to the city of Lahore. Many people, both Muslims and Hindus, died of the disease. . . . Since it appears from what aged people say and from history books that this illness has never appeared in this province before, the physicians and the learned were asked about the cause. Some say that since there have been two successive dry years with little rain during the monsoon, it has been caused by the putridity of the air arising from the dryness and lack of rain.52 Cumulatively, the disasters of these two years took a heavy toll, with over one thousand deaths occurring on a daily basis in Agra even in 1616.53 To ward off the effects of the 1613–15 calamity, Jahangir established hospitals in a number of north Indian cities with funds from the royal treasury.54 The emperor also donated cauldrons that could feed five thousand people at shrines such as that of Muin al-­Din Chishti, in Ajmer.55 At the same time, Jahangir constructed a series of riparian pavilions near the city of Ajmer in western India, where he had moved his court for three years. In 1615, the emperor constructed a small hunting palace on the banks of Pushkar lake, a Hindu pilgrimage site near Ajmer. In the same year, he built water  47

1.16. Pavilion, upper terrace, Chashma-yi Nur, Ajmer, 1615. Photo courtesy Yael R. Rice.

another pavilion in the hills west of Ajmer, adjacent to a stream that cascaded to the lower level of the structure, bringing together architecture and flowing water within one architectonic system (figure 1.16). While scholars are yet to take seriously the etiological linkages between water scarcity propelled by droughts and the emergence of architectural practices that privilege a vision of water, a reappraisal of the architectonics of Jahangir’s edifices in relation to the 1613–15 drought might connect the natural and the social in early modern South Asia. Describing his 1615 pavilion near Ajmer, Jahangir noted: There is a very lovely ravine in the vicinity of Ajmer, and at the end of the ravine is a spring, the water of which collects in a long, wide pool. It is the best water in Ajmer. . . . When I passed by, I ordered a structure worthy of the site built since the place was worthy of development. In one year, it had been turned into a real place, the likes of which world travelers could not point to. A pool forty ells square had been constructed, and the water from the spring had been made to pour into the pool through a fountain that sprayed ten or twelve ells high. Next to the pool were pavilions. Likewise, on the upper terrace, where the tank and spring were, harmonious

48  chap ter one

pavilions and delightful porticos and dwellings had been built—some decorated and painted by expert masters and skilled painters.56 Likewise, it is during the drought of 1613–15 that we see Vishram Ghat in Mathura, the principal ghat for pilgrimage in Braj, emerging as the locus of architectural projects that made seeing the flowing Yamuna central to an aesthetic appreciation of water. It would not be farfetched to read the construction of riparian architecture in Braj in relation to both the extensive droughts that had devastated north India and imperial Mughal hydrological projects. Like the careful framing of water in Jahangir’s pavilions near Ajmer, architecture was carefully ordered in Braj as well. Water, a limited commodity in drought-­ stricken north India, was consequently made visible. Built by Bir Singh Dev (r. 1605–27), the ruler of the central Indian kingdom of Orchha, the most prominent construction at Vishram Ghat was a tulabhara torana, a ceremonial archway used as a weighing scale to measure and distribute valuable commodities (figure 1.17). The ruler had sponsored the archway, or torana, when he weighed himself and donated his weight in gold at Vishram Ghat during pilgrimage to Mathura in 1614, along with an additional eighty-­one man (ca. 6,480 pounds) of gold representing the eighty-­one parganas (districts) that constituted his realm. This was a significant gesture. As the historian Dirk H. Kolff notes, “For centuries, the Orchha family would cherish the fact that the balance prepared to weigh the great king was still kept at Mathura on Vishram Ghat, dedicated to Krishna. His munificent gifts were mentioned in sanads [deeds] held by priests at the place.”57 The archway functioned as a ceremonial threshold linking the liminal space between land and flowing water, an architectonic configuration that corresponds to the etymon of the word torana as movement or rushing forth.58 To move forward, however, requires a spatial configuring of a rite of passage. As an architectural device, freestanding toranas were accordingly used as gateways to religious structures from as early as the first century BCE (figure 1.18). In the context of a Hindu temple or a Buddhist stupa, the movement through the gateway—the torana—would denote a movement from the profane to the sacred realm as an embodied practice of transforming oneself provisionally. The torana was as frequently used as an architectural motif. By the mid-­sixteenth century, the torana as a motif had appeared on the façade of the adjacent Sati Burj. At Vishram Ghat, however the torana functioned as a device of enframement. The flowing Yamuna could be viewed through the torana, while the river concurrently framed the edifice. Is the object of art history, then, the view of water and the frame of the architectural device an ideation of human intention and purpose bordering the view? Or is the object of art history the torana, framed by expansive water and the natural environment? As an optical arrangement, the frame is hardly ever inconsequential. Rather, as part of a representational whole, the frame most

water  49

1.17. Torana, Vishram Ghat, Mathura, 1614, with later refurbishments.

50  chap ter one

1.18. Great Stupa, Sanchi, ca. 50–25 BCE.

often operates as a generative space connecting the interior to the exterior and the internal to the external.59 Thus, the view of water from the torana is neither fully internal nor completely external to its frame. Bir Singh’s torana, then, underscored a different relationship between flowing water, sacred space, and vision. Operative here was a possible mode of seeing in which the view of water was framed by the archway, and water, in turn, framed the architecture, conjoining the frame and the object through a theological and aesthetic schema. The function of the frame in artistic praxis has been most powerfully articulated by the Italian artist, architect, and philosopher Leon Battista Alberti in his 1435 treatise on painting.60 According to Alberti, it was the frame that set the object of representation apart from what lay beyond it. While art history has revisited, over and again, the conundrum of the frame as an architectural arrangement that measures, determines, and regulates the fictional space of representation, an eco art history, following Jacques Derrida’s reflections on the parergon, might perhaps offer an ideation of the frame that “does not remain simply outside of the work, acting from the sidelines, next to the work (ergon).”61 The horizontal movement of the effervescent waters of the river Yamuna, we might then concede, produced an aqueous waterscape that shaped a very different system of spatial boundaries.

water  51

How does one account for the liquescent materiality of a substance that is constantly in flow? Does one begin by discerning stable architectural and representational forms that frame, contain, or, conversely, transmit the fluidity of water? Or does one situate the material shape of water in movement itself? Could one, then, dwell on the swirling materiality of water as immanent to its very mobility and capacity to flow? While architectural treatises categorize the myriad forms of toranas on the basis of placement, function, and embellishment, the tulabhara torana was specifically used as a balance for weighing gold, grains, and other precious commodities that were then ceremonially distributed. According to eleventh-­century architectural treatises such as the Architect of Human Dwellings (Samarāṅganasūtradhāra), the freestanding torana was a symbol of a monarch’s royal benevolence.62 Indeed, we see granite portals for the distribution of wealth in Hampi, the sixteenth-­century capital of the Vijayanagara empire in south India. The emperor Akbar, too, had transformed this recognized state ritual with deep historical roots into an imperial Mughal spectacle.63 Described in the mid-­seventeenth-­century History of Shah Jahan (Shāhjahānnāma) as the celebration of weight (jashn-­i wazn), Akbar, it seems, weighed himself twice a year and distributed the wealth in charity.64 Festivals and fireworks lasted for days, and Akbar might indeed have used a square podium with a canopy and flanking toranas in his capital in Fatehpur Sikri for this particular royal celebration (figure 1.19).65 Subsequent emperors, such as Jahangir, continued the practice, giving the custom imperial Mughal authority.66 In Akbar’s palace complex, the richly carved ornamental torana brackets of the podium emerge from the mouth of mythic, elephantine creatures to form a succession of semi-­circular arcs that meet under the center of each lintel. Described as the andola torana—a torana that mimics the undulation of waves—in architecture manuals, this device was commonly used in post-­ tenth-­century temple entrances to mark the threshold that demarcated the sacred from the non-­sacred.67 The andola torana was likewise frequently used as architectural ornamentation, the most prominent of such usage being the ca. 1500 fort complex in Gwalior built by Man Singh (see figure 1.7) and pre-­ Mughal western Indian mosques established by the Ahmad Shahi dynasty (ca. 1408–1577). The deployment of this particular torana in Fatehpur Sikri was thus consistent with Akbar’s larger architecture program of adopting both Hindu and Muslim pre-­Mughal styles to posit his palace complex as epitomizing an imperial cultural cosmopolitanism. In keeping with the non-­anthropomorphic architectural ethos of Fatehpur Sikri, the representations of deities in the interstices of the individual arcs were, however, replaced with characteristic Mughal rhombus-­shaped decorative forms. The torana on Vishram Ghat was a cognizant attempt on part of Bir Singh Dev to both incorporate Mughal architecture into the sacred riverfront of Vaishnava Braj and espouse the political significance of the ritual dispensation 52  chap ter one

1.19. Astrologer’s Seat, Fatehpur Sikri, ca. 1571.

water  53

1.20. Pillar, Principal Haramsara (Shabistan-i Iqbal), Fatehpur Sikri, ca. 1571.

54  chap ter one

of wealth as a form of royal munificence. At the ghat itself, miniature toranas on the 1570 Sati Burj provided a strong visual analogy. The use of red sandstone, now painted brilliant yellow, along with the mobilization of Mughal motifs, nonetheless takes us back to the architectonics of imperial Mughal architecture. While evidence points to artisans from Gujarat being employed in the construction of Akbar’s capital in Fatehpur Sikri, we have yet to uncover histories of artisanal patronage or praxis in early seventeenth-­century Braj.68 Thus, it would be difficult to surmise whether these Gujarati artisans had been commissioned to build the torana after Fatehpur Sikri was abandoned by Akbar in 1585. Perhaps that was the case. But an analysis of the ornamentation on the 1614 Vishram Ghat torana and on pillars in the palaces at Fatehpur Sikri, for instance in the principal haramsara (Shabistan-­i Iqbal), insinuate that both structures were undoubtedly constructed keeping an analogous architectural paradigm in sight (figure 1.20). Motifs such as the lotus-­shaped finial, the distinctive hanging chain-­and-­ bell pattern, rosettes in semi-­lotus forms, and oblong diamond shapes on both pillars suggest a shared notion of ornament that connects the structures, even as the origins of the motifs lay in the Hindu and Muslim architecture of pre-­ Mughal Gujarat. Thus, even while early seventeenth-­century Braj was built on sites made sacred through Krishna’s primordial inhabitance, the discursive framework that structured the optical experience of this space was a Mughal palace complex. At the same time, the floriated arch with a scrolling vine and lotuses emerging from the mouth of two aquatic makaras (chimeric elephant-­ headed creatures) placed the Vishram Ghat torana in a longer history of Vaishnava water cosmologies that emphasized creative abundance associated with plentiful water.69 Unlike the emblematic function of the torana as a passage from the profane to the sacred, the structure on Vishram Ghat did not allow for a ritualistic transformation that could occur with bodily movement through the portal. The torana did not demarcate spatial distinctions between the sacred and the non-­sacred, given the sacrality of Braj in its totality. Instead, the sole function of Bir Singh’s torana, at least for pilgrims visiting the site, was to behold the river as it was framed by the structure and to see the structure as the river framed it. Moving away from the ritualistic architectonics of passage, the torana generated a spatial intersection between sight and site, creating a different relationship between water and space in an age of unusual droughts. Even today, pilgrims approach the water, but not by passing through the portal. It is in the unfeasibility of an object-­frame binary operative here that a possible eco art history emerges, one that joins the frame and the object, architecture and the natural environment. The emergence of a distinctive hydroaesthetics of seeing flowing water in sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century Braj carefully interwove Vaishnava theology

water  55

and political governance. In many ways, the vision-­centric ideation of the Yamuna, framed through Bir Singh Dev’s architecture project in Braj, paralleled the emergence of a new theology based on the veneration of natural phenomena. Written by Gopal Bhatt (1503–78), a disciple of the Bengali mystic Chaitanya, the Performance of Devotion to Hari (Haribhaktivilāsa, ca. 1541; Hari is an epithet of Krishna), the most authoritative source for Chaitanya’s Gaudiya Vaishnava practices, described the function of the river Yamuna in Braj thus: “The river Sarasvati purifies one after three days. The river Narmada purifies one after seven weeks. The Ganga purifies one immediately. Yamuna purifies one who beholds it.”70 Even as established pre-­sixteenth-­century sacramental norms mandated haptic and gustatory absorption—that is, bathing at pilgrimage sites (snana) and drinking the water with which an icon’s feet is washed (caranamrita)—as primary forms of ritual engagement with sacred water, the 1541 text demarcated a hierarchy of sacred rivers centered on the privileging of vision, of seeing sacrosanct water. While immersing oneself in rivers such as the Ganga allowed the devotee to purify herself or himself, the Performance of Devotion to Hari affirmed that the act of absorbing the goddess Yamuna’s theophanic presence through ritualistic beholding was adequate for attaining purity. Given that these foundational Vaishnava texts were being composed in Braj in the mid-­sixteenth century, one could link the vision of the river Yamuna in text and material culture in decisive ways. Bir Singh’s meteoric rise in the early seventeenth century was premised on the close political relationship that he shared with the Mughal emperor Jahangir.71 Court poetry was marshaled by Bir Singh to further concretize a triangulated relationship among his capital in Orchha, the pilgrimage center of Braj, and imperial Mughal centers. In Deeds of Bir Singh Dev (Vīrsiṃhdevcarit; 1607), a chronicle composed for the ruler’s accession in 1605, the court poet Keshavdas Mishra thus celebrated the river Betwa’s beauty as it passed through Orchha and flowed into the Yamuna. Using the topography of north-­central India to create a connected geography of piety, Mishra’s eulogy was both evocative and explicit. Mishra wrote: The minds of kings are charmed and captivated at its [the Betwa’s] mere sight. When the dark waters of the Betwa brighten up, then this looks like the Yamuna. . . . This Betwa is an ally of Yamuna, just like Ganga is an ally of Yamuna and this Betwa has, like the Ganga, huge waves and hence she is as beautiful and glorious as the Ganga.72 What emerges from this poetic chronicle is a cartography of connected rivers, each embedded within particularized local narratives yet inherently linked through the flow of water from one river system into another. The Betwa flows 56  chap ter one

into the Yamuna, the Yamuna meets the Ganga and, in process, connects Orchha to Braj and flows onward onto the Gangetic plain. Furthermore, the emphasis on the physical form of the Betwa as the river that captivates the “minds of kings” by “mere sight” brings to the forefront the role of seeing in producing an imaginative geography in the seventeenth century that, in turn, enabled a political praxis. The court poet Keshavdas Mishra thus produced a constitutive relationship between geopolitics and vision by underscoring the function of seeing the “beauty” of the turbulent waters of the dark Betwa. Consequently, seeing the river became pivotal in the production of a connected geopolitics that was grounded on comprehending the aesthetics of the natural environment. In effect, both courtly architecture and literary cultures were mobilized by Bir Singh Dev to collocate Vaishnava Braj, Mughal Agra, and his own kingdom in central India. By the 1740s, European visitors, for instance the Jesuit missionary Joseph Tiefenthaler, would write about the prominence of Vishram Ghat in pilgrimage practices in Braj.73 We see continued patronage at the site well into the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Augmenting Bir Singh Dev’s architecture program, Jai Singh II (1688–1743) of Amber, the founder of the city of Jaipur in contemporary Rajasthan, built a temple at Vishram Ghat in 1732.74 The monarch had, in fact, visited Braj earlier in 1727 as well, when he had offered his weight in gold at Vishram Ghat.75 Jai Singh, one assumes, would have used Bir Singh’s 1614 torana to ritually weigh himself, emphasizing the sustained importance of this particular edifice. Jai Singh’s patronage at the ghat could, without doubt, be situated within a recognized Kachhwaha genealogy of religious patronage in Braj that began with the establishment of the pilgrimage site in the sixteenth century. The Kachhwaha ruler Bhagwantdas, for instance, sponsored Sati Burj in 1570. Man Singh I (1540–1614), one of Amber’s most illustrious rulers and the highest-­ranking officer in Akbar’s court, built the famed Govind Dev Temple in Braj in 1590 (see figure 2.7).76 In 1727, the same year that he performed the tulabhara ceremony at Vishram Ghat, Jai Singh II made Govind Dev, the icon of the 1590 temple, the tutelary deity of his kingdom. From then on, Govind Dev was seen as the ruler of the land and the Kachhwaha monarchs merely the icon’s agent. Jai Singh’s royal seal further reiterated the political suzerainty of the icon by stating that the Kachhwahas had taken shelter at the feet of the icon. The nineteenth century continued to see sustained construction at Vishram Ghat, including the building of a number of temples and subsidiary toranas. The Maharaja of Banaras, for instance, performed the tulabhara ceremony in 1889 at the ghat. Expanding the existing architecture program, the monarch sponsored a new torana to commemorate his act of royal benevolence.77 The emergence of a distinctive aesthetics of seeing flowing water thus carefully interwove Vaishnava theology, political governance, and the ritualized act of beholding the natural environment. In such a beholding, hydroaesthetics became the water  57

crucial link that joined localized creative practices with an expanded nonhuman transterritorial arena of water scarcity in the early modern world.

Seeing Transversally The deliberate attempt by Vaishnava devotees in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries to rehearse intimate associations with Mughal hydrocultures demands a reengagement with the political and aesthetic histories of water in early modern South Asia. This history can best be designated by a paradigm that Marshall G. S. Hodgson aptly described in the 1970s as “the social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and the Muslims, both among Muslims themselves and even when found among non-­Muslims.”78 More recently, art historians of South Asia have further explored Hodgson’s notion of the Islamicate through analyzing non-­Muslim art, architecture, and sartorial cultures that makes visible shared sensibilities, codes of conduct, and aesthetic systems in the subcontinent.79 In a similar vein, the manuscripts and riparian structures discussed here offer a rich testament to the Islamicate aesthetics that permeated the land of Krishna from its very establishment in the sixteenth century. The Muslim elite in Mughal Braj were equally engaged in the production of the pilgrimage site’s sacred topography. The steps leading to the Yamuna at Vishram Ghat, for instance, were built under the patronage of ‘Abd al-­Nabi Khan, the commandant (faujdar) of Mathura under the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (1618–1707).80 The Mughal officer, who paradoxically emerges as a zealot Muslim in both scholarly texts and local histories, had also sponsored Mathura’s Jami Mosque in 1660–61 (see figure 3.9).81 ‘Abd al-­Nabi Khan’s concurrent sponsoring of a mosque and patronizing the steps to the most important ghat in Mathura should not surprise us. Given the significance of Vishram Ghat in contemporaneous pilgrimage practices, this may have been an astute political maneuver designed to win over the Vaishnava constituencies in Braj. That the Mughal commandant’s maneuver was indeed effective is evident from a 1782 account that reports a local aphorism in Mathura: “Nabījī tum bin Mathurā sūnī” (Without you, ‘Abd al-­Nabi Khan, Mathura is dreary).82 However, to reconsider the cognitive and political orientation that is necessary for an eco art history, it is essential to bring together two discreet strands of historiography: one centered on the political aesthetics of the Islamicate outlined above and the second engaged with ecological aesthetics. Hydroaesthetics, in that sense, offers a possible vector to comprehend the interconnectedness of the environmental, the political, and the aesthetic. “Nature,” Félix Guattari reminds us, “cannot be separated from culture; in order to comprehend the interactions between eco-­systems, . . . we must learn to think ‘transversally.’ ”83 In such a maneuver, transversality could perhaps provide a deeper history of

58  chap ter one

artistic practices that centralized the act of seeing water in an age of great droughts. The transversal lines of the river Yamuna that run across the Isarda Bhāgavata folio could then also become a site to explore a more capacious history of art, one that is open to the interweaving of the human and the environmental. As Tim Ingold puts it, “Ecology, in short, is the study of the life of lines.”84

water  59



two | land Upon the summit of Govarddhana [Govardhan], Krishna presented himself, saying, “I am the mountain” . . . whilst in his own form as Krishna he ascended the hill along with the cowherds, and wor­ shipped his other self.—Vis¸n¸u Pur¯an¸a (Tales of Vishnu)

Fourteen miles from Vishram Ghat in Mathura stands the hill that Krishna is believed to have miraculously lifted to protect the inhabitants of Braj from the torrential rain sent by Indra, the king of gods (figure 2.1). Narrated in the Tales of Vishnu (Viṣṇu Purāṇa; fourth or fifth century CE), the elegiac account begins with Krishna encouraging the pastoral community of Braj not to worship Indra but to commemorate the end of monsoon by venerating the natural topography of the region. To persuade the cowherds of Braj, Krishna asks, “What have we to do with Indra? Cattle and mountains are our gods. Brahmans offer worship with prayer; cultivators of the earth adore their landmarks; but we, who tend our herds in the forests and mountains, should worship them and our kine.”1 Heeding the young Krishna’s advice, the pastoral community prepares an enormous feast in honor of Govardhan hill. Then, to reveal the sacredness of the natural topography of Braj, Krishna majestically proclaims, “I am the mountain.” Thus narrativizing the life of Krishna among the herdsmen of Braj, texts such as the Tales of Vishnu and the Dynasty of Hari (Harivaṃśa; ca. 300 CE) reiterate that Govardhan hill was indeed Krishna’s divine body, in process emphasizing the non-­separation between the natural environment and the anthropomorphic body of the lord.2 Govardhan, which literally means “an increaser of cattle,” was, according to texts, the other self of Krishna. Indra, the king of the gods, did not take the affront lightly. Outraged at the loss of offering, Indra, who was also the god of rain and thunderstorm, sent a deluge to inundate the region. “The whole earth was enveloped in impenetrable darkness by the thick and volumed clouds; and above, below and on every side, the world 61

2.1. Satellite image of Govardhan ridge and the Yamuna. Source: ArcGIS Online map hosted by Esri. Map image is the intellectual property of Esri and is used herein under license. Copyright © 2018 Esri, Earthstar Geographics, CNES/Airbus DS.

was water.”3 To protect Braj from the rainstorm, Krishna lifted Govardhan hill and held it aloft with one hand so that the inhabitants of Braj could take shelter under it. After seven days of incessant rain, the king of gods eventually conceded defeat and came down to earth to venerate Krishna. Scholars of anthropology and religion have read this narrative of the encounter between Krishna and Indra as a confrontation between the Vedic pantheon and an emergent Vaishnavism in the early centuries of the Common Era.4 Art historians attentive to religious iconography and the visual morphology of style have also examined sculptures of Krishna’s prodigious act.5 By the fifth century, reliefs and freestanding icons of Krishna holding Govardhan hill were being consistently produced across north India with a common iconographic program that made visible the young cowherd’s numinous capacity in lifting a hill with one hand.6 Like most fifth-­and sixth-­century representations of Krishna holding Govardhan hill, a sandstone sculpture discovered in Mathura also portrays the young cowherd holding a slab of stone with deltoid clefts carved on it to emulate the topography of a hill (figure 2.2).7 Flanked by cows hiding in the crevices of Govardhan hill to escape Indra’s rain, Krishna is depicted with an elongated garland of wild flowers (vanamala), an attribute of the monarchical Vishnu. On both sides of Krishna stand cowherds, hand gestures signifying piety. As one of the earliest sculptures of Krishna found in 62  chap ter t wo

2.2. Krishna holding Govardhan hill, ca. sixth century CE. Sandstone, 53.5 cm (height). Reposi­tory: Government Museum, Mathura, 00.D.47.

Mathura, the visual focus, however, is on the graceful body of the deity, whose relaxed posture and sinuous form further underscores the mystical nature of this divine act. In most fifth-­and sixth-­century sculptures, the hill appears as a slender horizontal block of stone that mirrors the base of the frieze on which Krishna stands, in effect framing the body of the deity. The visual emphasis on Krishna’s corporeal presence, alongside the widespread popularization of the specific iconography in this period, could perhaps be read in relation to the textual and liturgical cultures that had materialized with the rise of a new orthodox Vaishnavism in the early centuries of the Common Era.8 According to the Tales of Vishnu, Krishna was the protector of the earth, the transcendent Supreme Being who was also the embodiment of a warrior-­king. Monarchs, as texts from this period assert, protect the earth with the sheer force of their arms.9 Thus it was Krishna as the Lord of the Mountain who defended Braj from Indra’s inundation by holding up Govardhan hill with his left palm. l and   63

However, with the emergence of a new form of  Vaishnavism in the sixteenth century, a different analogic relation between the divine body and land became tangible. New visual forms of representing Govardhan hill also emerged in this period in conjunction with treatises written by disciples of Chaitanya and Vallabha who had migrated to the pilgrimage center of Braj. The sixteenth century thus saw the advent of a new cosmological correlation between body and land and its representation in the material of stone. Just as the water of the river Yamuna as sensorial matter and sacramental fluid delineated a geoaesthetic topos in sixteenth-­century Braj, the natural world was linked to the materiality of sculpture and architecture through the material of stone in both text and artistic praxis in the region.10 The hill and the river, Govardhan and the Yamuna, were accordingly intricately interconnected through an amalgamation of artistic, liturgical, and environmental systems within which devotional cultures flourished. The annual worship of the hill on the first day of the waxing half of the lunar month of Kartik (October–November) is followed by the worship of the Yamuna on the very next day. Contemporary liturgical representations of the Three Treasures (teen nidhi) of Braj include Krishna as the Lord of Govardhan flanked by the anthropomorphic form of the Yamuna on the left and the Vaishnava reformer Vallabha on the right (figure 2.3). Although the Yamuna flows east of Mathura today, the river, adorned with blossoming lotuses, also appears in the lower register of votive images as a watercourse flowing by the foot of the sacred hill. Satellite imagery of flood plain deposits show that the earliest channel of the river Yamuna did, indeed, flow north to south alongside Govardhan ridge from where it took an eastern course toward present-­day Mathura (see figure 2.1). Using digital image processing to enhance the paleochannels of the river, geologists suggest that the Yamuna changed its course from west to east between Govardhan and Mathura around 1500 BCE.11 While such a precise geochronology of the river’s changing course is perhaps contentious, the names of villages around Govardhan ridge indicate a strong association with the Yamuna, echoing the intimate geological relationship between the hill and flowing water.12 This geological coterminity also structured the cosmic ecologies of Braj. But first, a historiographic segue. By and large, it was with the publication of Mircea Eliade’s Traité d’histoire des religions in 1949 that geographies of religion emerged as a critical arena in scholarly debate.13 Although Émile Durk­ heim’s Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse is often read as a pivotal moment in this historiography, it was Eliade’s conceptualization of hierophany as the manifestation of sacred symbols in a worldly realm that opened the dialectic for a locative vision of place in subsequent writing.14 Along with Eliade’s work, Maurice Merleau-­Ponty’s writings on phenomenology, Yi-­Fu Tuan’s theorization on space and experience, and Jonathan Z. Smith’s revisionist reading of emplacement are, in retrospect, the key moments in this now vast field of study.15 As a discipline, however, art history has tended to focus on the 64  chap ter t wo

2.3. Three Treasures of Braj (Teen Nidhi), 2015. Offset print on gold foil paper, 12.7 × 17.8 cm. Repository: Author’s collection. Photo courtesy Julie Wolf.

land­scape as a scopic regime of picturing land—the natural environment— mediated, reimagined, and aestheticized as an act of visual description or ekphrasis.16 Derived from the Dutch word landschap, the slippage from land to landscape, from land to a picture depicting scenery on land, occurred as a painterly discourse in sixteenth-­century Europe. As the anthropologist Tim Ingold writes, “Of early medieval provenance, it [landscape] referred originally to an area of land bound into the everyday practices and customary usages of an agrarian community. . . . Nevertheless, the equation of the shape of the land with its look—of the scaped with the scopic—has become firmly lodged in the vocabulary of modernist art history. Landscape has thus come to be identified with scenery and with an art of description that would see the world spread out on a canvas.”17 Only in the recent past have posthuman critiques of theories of representation reengaged both the abstract and the physical through new modalities that triangulate the relationship among human bodies, land, and landscape.18 Dialogically linking both human and nonhuman life forms l and   65

such as forests, hills, and lakes, such recent engagements offer new ways of thinking about associations and linkages that do not separate the human and the natural environment. Space, in such a configuration, becomes tangible matter rather than just a symbol or a metaphor. Land, enfolded conceptually and materially, instead of being an abstract philosophy of space, becomes the entangled medium through which geoaesthetics is exercised. A focus on Govardhan hill as embodied land—as both a living being and a low homoclinal quartzite ridge extending some five miles northeast to southwest—thus allows us to approach assemblages of human-­nonhuman relationships that shaped art and architecture practices in early modern South Asia.19 Rather than considering the landscape, which from an eco-­art historical perspective merely reiterates the reducibility of the natural environment into a picture regulated by the anthropocentric human subject, we will turn to the geomorphological material that constitutes land—the texture of stone, the granulation of dust, the color of soil—as both sacramental substance and agentive matter within the theological worlds of early modern Braj. To take the materiality of matter seriously, however, requires us to be attentive to the political, socio-­economic, aesthetic, and ecological history of land itself. Adopting an approach that we may perhaps recognize as transdisciplinary consequently deepens a geoaesthetic approach to art history. Before we turn to architecture and the materiality of stone in the second section of the chapter, we situate land within a matrix that conjuncts taxation and revenue systems through which land accrued economic value, political contestations through which land accrued social value, and climatic changes that transformed the very nature of the land itself.

For the Love of Land No doubt Braj presents a complex, multilayered, geoaesthetic scene. According to the Account of the Manifestation of Shrinathji (Śrīnāthjī kī Prākaṭya Vārtā), on the third day of the dark half of the month of Shravan (July–August) in 1410, the day dedicated to the worship of snakes, a cowherd discovered a reddish-­ black stone arm emerging from the summit of Govardhan hill at dawn.20 News of this miraculous occurrence spread far and wide. According to sectarian literature, an elderly cowherd who was among the witnesses to this unusual appearance recounted on seeing the stone arm, “Once upon a time, Śrī Kṛṣṇa kept mount Giriraj [Govardhan] aloft for seven days together and, after the rain finally had come to an end, he put the hill down on the earth and then all the Brajvasis [inhabitants of Braj] of those days worshipped His arm: this is the very same Arm!”21 Worship was consequently established at the site and a village fair held annually on the day of the arm’s appearance. In 1478, after almost six decades, the self-­manifesting icon (svayambhu) finally thrust itself out of the earth on the precise day Vallabha was born in central India. 66  chap ter t wo

2.4. Krishna as Shrinathji, ca. 1850. Watercolor and gold on paper, 33.6 × 24.9 cm. Repository: Victoria and Albert Museum, London, IS.187-1964. Photo courtesy Victoria and Albert Museum.

Eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century votive paintings of the icon reveal that the 1.37-­meter stone sculpture that had allegedly emerged from the earth in 1478 was a high-­relief figure of Krishna holding Govardhan hill set against a rectangular stele with animals such as snakes, peacocks, parrots, cows, and rams carved on the rock’s incised fissures (figure 2.4). Yet since the icon had come forth from the bedrock of the hill, the sculpture was, at least to the ecclesiastic community, both the striated reddish sandstone that constituted Govardhan hill and an image of the ridge.22 At the same time, the icon, known as the Lord of Govardhan (Govardhannath) or Shrinathji (the Lord of Shri, the goddess of wealth), was a visual representation of Krishna lifting Govardhan hill. Accordingly, the hollowed space directly behind the figure was left undecorated to resemble the grotto beneath the hill from where Krishna had manifested himself.23 The stele was thus simultaneously land and landscape. l and   67

Rather than being a pictorial representation of land, the sculpture assimilated both the symbolic and the somatic through its assumed mineralogical provenance. In that sense, the figure of Shrinathji brought forth an immanent relation between sculpture and space, between lithic materiality and the natural environment of Braj. Given that the custodians of Shrinathji Temple do not allow photography at the temple or permit scholars to access the shrine, painted representations of the sculpture are the only archives available to explore the history of the icon’s emergence.24 In the early twentieth century, the art historian and curator Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, for instance, suggested on the basis of a number of votive paintings of Shrinathji that he had acquired from Mathura that the stele was a ca. second-­century Buddhist sculpture repurposed in the sixteenth century as a Vaishnava icon.25 However, in the recent past, it has been proposed that the stele was perhaps carved out of black schist that was characteristically used for sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century sculpture in Rajasthan, of which a ca. sixteenth-­century figure from Arthuna in southern Rajasthan of Vishnu and his consort Lakshmi is an outstanding example (figure 2.5).26 Both the icon of Shrinathji and the Arthuna sculpture of Vishnu share visual resemblances, including large, almond-­shaped eyes, a corpulent face counterpoised by a sharp nose and elongated ears, and a pronounced torso. The strong stylistic similarities suggest that the Pushtimarg priests had perhaps acquired the icon of Shrinathji from southern Rajasthan in the sixteenth or the seventeenth century.27 According to texts written by the followers of Vallabha, which offer a narrative that contradicts other sectarian accounts, the next significant event surrounding the establishment of worship in Govardhan was in 1493, when the stone icon of Shrinathji commanded the Vaishnava reformer to visit Braj and establish the proper worship of Krishna as Lord of Govardhan. Accordingly, Vallabha hastened to Braj and built a small temple, where the icon was enshrined. In 1499, Shrinathji then appeared to a diamond merchant from Ambala, a major mercantile center in north India, with instructions to expand Vallabha’s temple. Although an architect from Agra consequently laid the foundation of the new temple in 1500 after Shrinathji also appeared to him in a dream, construction was finally completed in 1519.28 In contrast, according to Gaudiya sources, it was the ascetic Madhavendra Puri (ca. 1420–90) who discovered the stone stele in Govardhan after Krishna appeared to him in a dream.29 Subsequently, Puri built a temple on the ridge and instituted worship. Sectarian accounts provide divergent, indeed conflicting, interpretations of the emergence of Shrinathji in Braj. Rather than sifting these fantastic tales through rationalist frames, reading the incongruities and frictions in such accounts with a dialogic sensitivity brings to the fore a conception of the natural environment that has been marginalized by the intersecting forces of positivist histories of religion and modernity. “What mattered,” the anthropologist 68  chap ter t wo

2.5. Vishnu and Lakshmi on Garuda, ca. 1500. Chlorite Schist, 80 × 45.7 cm. Repository: Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, The Avery Brundage Collection, B60S108. Photograph © Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.

Talal Asad notes, “was not the authenticity of facts about the past but the power of the spiritual idea they sought to convey.”30 Although Pushtimarg accounts assert that Shrinathji had refused food from Madhavendra Puri, Gaudiya sources state that Chaitanya visited Govardhan specifically to venerate the stone stele that Puri worshipped.31 According to the hagiographic biography of Chaitanya, the mystic from Bengal had refused to climb the ridge during his pilgrimage to Braj since Govardhan hill was an embodied living being, Krishna himself.32 Instead, delirious with joy, Chaitanya embraced a piece of rock (sila) and circumambulated the ridge as if the hill itself was a sacred icon. This corporeal topophilia—“the affective bond between people and place”33—made possible the love for a mass of mylonitized quartzitic rock as both an object of devotion and an embodied living being. By experiencing the embodied matter that constituted Govardhan hill, devotees and pilgrims could forge a topohilic relation between body and place. l and   69

Govardhan hill has received attention both as a metonymic divinity—a manifestation (svarupa) of Krishna himself—and as a narrow ridge thirteen miles west of Mathura.34 As early as the 1970s, Charlotte Vaudeville, a student of the renowned French Indologist Louis Renou, argued that Braj had become a center of Krishna worship in the sixteenth century.35 We might, with Vaudeville, see Vaishnava Braj as having been a tabula rasa until its discovery by Chaitanya and Vallabha. Or with more recent scholarship, we might choose instead to view Braj as a palimpsest of diverse forms of Vaishnavism from the first century onward.36 However, setting aside the question of longue durée histories of Vaishnavism in Braj, it might be worth our while to reconsider Vaudeville’s remarkable essay through an ecocritical perspective: It may be doubted if any specifically “Krishnaite” cult, other than a primitive form of nature worship (including hills, waters, cows, trees and snakes), combined with some form of Devī [goddess] worship, existed among the rural (pastoral) populations of Braj before the arrival of the great Vaiṣṇava reformers in Govardhan and Vṛndāban at the beginning of the sixteenth century. It is probably to their disappointment with such primitive forms of worship that we owe the famous legend of the “loss” and “recovery” of the innumerable tīrthas [pilgrimage centers] and līlā-­ sthalas [sites where Krishna performed miraculous deeds] of Braj.37 During fieldwork in India in the mid-­decades of the twentieth century, Vaudeville observed an intimate correlation among serpent worship, the veneration of sacred water, and tree worship that was still prevalent in rural India. Reading these ritual practices alongside post-­first-­century archaeological evidence of serpent (naga) worship in Braj, Vaudeville suggested that the sixteenth century saw Vaishnava reformers adopting localized forms of nature worship to articulate a new devotionalism based on loving Krishna as embodied land. In the 1570s, however, altercations ensued between the Pushtimargis and the Gaudiyas over the control of the ridge when a group of Vallabha’s followers set fire to the Gaudiya encampment and gained jurisdiction over Shrinathji Temple.38 Until then, Chaitanya’s disciples had managed the site. Soon after, the dispute reached the Mughal court, where the emperor Akbar adjudicated in favor of the Pushtimargis.39 Over the next few years, the Pushtimargi priests received a number of imperial grants assuring exemption from taxation and protection while proselytizing in Mughal territory. The first of these grants was given in 1577, followed by one in 1581, and another in 1588. A 1593 bequest by Akbar also recognized the descendants of Vallabha as the sole owners of the village of Gokul near Govardhan.40 Not only was the land exempted from taxation, but it was also to be held in perpetuity by the Pushtimarg community, who were to utilize the revenue from the land to defray the expenditure of worship at Shrinathji Temple. Under the leadership of Vallabha’s son Vitthalnath (1515–ca. 1585), the Pushtimarg community thus established a strong presence 70  chap ter t wo

in Braj. Despite sectarian claims to the contrary, the development of a Pushtimarg community in Braj thus occurred much after Vallabha’s death in 1530. Nevertheless, a revisiting of this contestation through the lens of the cataclysms of sixteenth-­century droughts might offer a different approach to envision the concurrent institution of worship in Govardhan in the 1570s and Pushtimarg petitions to Akbar to secure land in Braj. In the face of a calamitous agrarian crisis that had occurred as a result of the droughts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, land was reconstituted as both measurable territory and the embodiment of a cosmological order. The 1578 El Niño Southern Oscillation—a cyclic warming and cooling of the ocean surface along the coast of Ecuador and Peru that effects rainfall in the Indian Ocean—was one of the severest climatic disturbances in the sixteenth century. The 1578 disturbance surpassed the El Niño turbulences of the earlier decades, and its effects led to a global climatic upheaval, with rain scarcity in South Asia that significantly affected agriculture.41 In Braj, the failure of agriculture from the caprices of weather in the 1570s and the production of a cosmology of sacred geoterrains operated in tandem to alter ideations of territory and human relation to it. Land, in this new theo-­ ecological configuration, was not merely passive space to be controlled but a living agent in and of itself. Thus, after seizing Govardhan, the Pushtimargis established a new liturgical praxis based on the philosophy of shuddhadvaita (nondualism).42 Pushtimarg priests asserted that there was no ontological distinction between the manifest and the unmanifest, between the worldly and the non-­worldly. The only way to worship the divine was through seva (service) to the icon of Shrinathji. If indeed the ridge of Govardhan—its reddish quartzitic rock, its topography, and even its dust—was the manifest form of the unmanifest, of Krishna himself, serving this space became a mode of venerating the divine. Accordingly, Vitthalnath, Vallabha’s son, developed an elaborate ritualistic practice in Govardhan, where the stone stele was worshipped eight times a day. For the Gaudiyas, however, the loss of Govardhan in the midst of the agrarian crisis of the late 1570s and the early 1580s caused great trepidation. This loss was certainly symbolic within the religious worlds of early modern north India. But at a time of devastating crop failures, the loss of income from over 880 bighas (approximately 655 acres) of cultivable land owned by the community was also significant.43 Thus, after losing Govardhan, the Gaudiyas acquired six plots of uncultivated wasteland (zamin-­i uftada) in 1579 in the village of Arith, two miles northeast of the ridge. From grants recording the acquisition of the land, we learn that the Gaudiyas excavated two large ponds at the site while constructing drainage channels and wells (chah-­i talab) to bring flowing water to the artificial pools (figure 2.6).44 Although according to hagiography, Chaitanya was supposed to have revealed the two ponds of Radhakund and Krishnakund, believed to be Krishna l and   71

2.6. Radhakund lake, Radhakund, 1579, with later refurbishments.

and Radha’s bathing places, during his pilgrimage to Govardhan in 1514, the 1579 deed gives a clear account of the construction of the two waterbodies. This dissonance in liturgical literature and administrative archives regarding the discovery and establishment of Radhakund reiterates the gradual and ongoing process through which Braj became vital to Vaishnava theology and praxis in north India. “A sacred space,” historians of religion David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal write, “is not merely discovered, or founded, or constructed; it is claimed, owned, and operated by people advancing specific interests.”45 As a ritualized performative act that brought together the right to worship and ownership of property, topophilia was then shaped through claims and counterclaims to land. Over time, Radhakund, too, became a key Gaudiya pilgrimage site in Braj.

The Materiality of Stone It was with the 1590 consecration of Govind Dev, a monumental red-­sandstone temple in Vrindavan, six miles north of Mathura, that the process of topophilic space-­making initiated by Chaitanya’s disciples in Braj came to fruition (figure 2.7). Although Rupa Goswami, a direct disciple of Chaitanya and the author of The Ocean of the Essence of Devotional Rasa had built a temple for the icon of 72  chap ter t wo

2.7. Govind Dev Temple, Vrindavan, 1590.

Govind Dev in Vrindavan around 1535, archival records ascertain that the construction of the current temple of Govind Dev had commenced by 1565, when the Mughal emperor Akbar bequeathed around 200 bighas (approximately 150 acres) of revenue-­free land to the priests of the temple.46 Much like the appearance of Shrinathji from Govardhan ridge, the opaque, black-­stone icon of Govind Dev, too, had purportedly appeared to Rupa Goswami in 1525 from a hill in Vrindavan (figure 2.8).47 Paralleling the narrative of the construction of Shrinathji Temple in Govardhan, Gaudiya literature suggests that Rupa built a temple on the hill within the next ten years. Sectarian sources inform us that the patron of the temple, the Kachhwaha ruler Man Singh I, the son of Bhagwantdas who had sponsored the 1570 Sati Burj in Mathura, vowed in 1571 to build the temple if he was able to defeat the kingdom of Mewar in battle.48 It has also been suggested that he built the temple to commemorate his recently deceased father.49 Man Singh’s father, Bhagwantdas, however, died only one year before the temple was consecrated and construction on the temple had started in the 1560s. Given this discrepancy, it seems far more likely that the construction of the temple was begun under the patronage of Bhagwantdas and not his son Man Singh. The temple was completed only in 1590, within twelve years of the Gaudiya community being expelled from Govardhan.50 l and   73

2.8. The icon of Govind Dev in worship, Govind Dev Temple, Jaipur.

By 1598, the Gaudiyas had become the principal beneficiaries of Mughal patronage in the region. Although Akbar intermittently bequeathed endowments to both the Gaudiyas and the Pushtimargis from the middle decades of the sixteenth century, it was after a 1598 imperial survey of the principal shrines in Braj by Abu’l-­Fazl that the emperor selected thirty-­five temples that would continue receiving royal benefaction.51 Most of the selected temples belonged to the Gaudiyas; that two of Akbar’s esteemed courtiers—the Kachhwaha ruler Man Singh I and Todar Mal (d. 1589), a minister in the imperial court—were patrons of significant Gaudiya temples in Vrindavan may well have led to the decision to favor the Gaudiyas over the Pushtimargis. Man Singh I had sponsored the temple of Govind Dev. Man Singh’s grandfather, Bharmal (r. 1548–74), had offered his daughter in marriage to Akbar in 1562 and had personally facilitated the emperor’s 1565 gift to Govind Dev. Similarly, in 1584, Madanmohan Temple in Vrindavan received a land estate from Todar Mal.52 Akbar’s bequests to the Gaudiya temples in Vrindavan, one assumes, arose from his proximity to these courtiers.53 Described by Frederic S. Growse, the amateur architecture historian and collector of the Mathura District, as “the most impressive religious edifice 74  chap ter t wo

2.9. Interior, view from east entrance, Govind Dev Temple, Vrindavan, 1590.

Hindu art has ever produced,” Govind Dev has today become a key monument in the history of early modern architecture in South Asia.54 Reading the color of the sandstone used to construct Govind Dev (ca. 1565–90) and the Mughal capitals in Agra (1565–ca. 1571) and Fatehpur Sikri (ca. 1571–85), and considering the colossal internal vault of the temple, a feature that was also employed in structures such as Akbar’s Jahangiri Mahal in Agra, scholars have suggested that a new architectural typology emerged in Vrindavan in this period in negotiation with contemporaneous Mughal aesthetics (figure 2.9).55 Indeed, at the time of its construction, Govind Dev was the largest temple to have been built in north India since the thirteenth century. Separated by around thirty miles, the temple and the edifices in Akbar’s palaces in Fatehpur Sikri and Agra did share visual homologies that ranged l and   75

2.10. West side of south bay, Govind Dev Temple, Vrindavan, 1590.

from the use of decorative serpentine brackets to a largely austere surface offset by horizontal ridging and stylized lotus medallions (figure 2.10). Much like in the palace complexes in Sikri, the uninterrupted horizontal moldings on the temple’s exterior surfaces are counterpoised by bracketed oriel windows. In the recent past, the temple has become especially critical for an analysis of Islamicate aesthetics in early modern South Asia that underscores cultural and creative interactions across religious and political boundaries. In the face of rising anti-­Muslim politics in post-­1990s India, the temple is now also seen as a paradigmatic example of early modern artistic practices that were not bound by religious divisions.56 A ca. 1618 inscription on the right side of the door to the sanctum of Govind Dev Temple only reiterates this close association between 76  chap ter t wo

the Mughal emperor and the Gaudiyas. Praising Akbar as a ruler under whom Vrindavan flourished, the inscription states: When Akbar naturally ruled all the world, the group of good people engaged in [performing] their own dharma [proper actions] obtained happiness in the highest degree. The virtuous Vaiṣṇavas always gave him blessings joyfully because they considered that very place [Vṛndāvana to be] the place of Śrī Govinda [and therefore] worth residing in.57 Akbar’s abolition of the pilgrimage tax after visiting Mathura in 1563, his alleged encounters with Gaudiya saints, a general strategy of toleration toward non-­ Muslims, and his munificence to the Gaudiya community in Braj are indicative of his religious policy in the later years of his reign.58 Perhaps it is this close connection between Akbar and the patrons of the Vrindavan temples that also led to a conscious citation of Akbar’s fort palaces in creating the vocabulary of a sixteenth-­century Vaishnava architecture in Vrindavan. An inscription on the northern wall of an ancillary shrine specifies that the mason (silpin), Govindadasa, was from the city of Delhi. Although the lack of corroborative evidence prevents us from exploring Govindadasa’s oeuvre, one assumes that he would have been familiar with the architecture of mid-­sixteenth-­century Delhi. Delhi served as Akbar’s capital until 1565, when the emperor initiated the construction of the Agra fort. The construction of Govind Dev, too, had commenced by the late 1560s.59 Thus, the guild working on the construction of the temple would perhaps have been familiar with contemporaneous structures in Delhi, such as Khair al-­Manazil Mosque (1561), Nizam al-­Din Auliya’s tomb (rebuilt 1562), the tomb of Ataga Khan (1566–67), and the tomb of Akbar’s father, Humayun, built in the 1560s. These structures, however, were not necessarily connected through one particular architectural paradigm. The tomb of Ataga Khan, for instance, was based on older South Asian tomb typologies, while Humayun’s tomb was built by Mirak Mirza Ghiyas, from Herat, on Timurid prototypes. But architectural elements such as oriel windows, a fringe of lotus buds along the intrados, and red-­sandstone bracketed supports that appear in Braj, Agra, and Fatehpur Sikri were already being actively used in mid-­sixteenth-­century Delhi in structures such as Qal‘a­i Kuhna Mosque, built by Sher Shah Suri, the Afghan commander who seized the Mughal throne in 1540 (figure 2.11). One can imagine that the Gaudiya impulse to associate themselves with the Muslim rulers of South Asia was driven by a precipitous necessity. The substantial wealth—gold, land, and cash grants—that temples in Braj attracted from kingdoms across north India from the late sixteenth century onward led to innumerable disputes and convoluted legal battles over the control of resources. In most instances, it was the Mughal emperor who was called upon to arbitrate.60 Thus, rehearsing claims of familiarity with the Mughal throne had become crucial to the Gaudiyas’ survival in a context in which l and   77

2.11. Qal‘a-i Kuhna Mosque, Delhi, ca. 1540–45.

conflicting Vaishnava sects constructed myths of preeminence centered on claims to sacred land. For our purposes, however, it is the doorway leading to the octagonal antechamber, or vestibule (antarala), of Govind Dev that is significant in this account of the entanglement between land as physical tangible natural resource and landscape as a visual ekphrasis of that space (figure 2.12). While logocentric ontology makes a chiasmic distinction between land and landscape as the territorializing of land into art through visual and textual descriptions, a sandstone relief of Krishna lifting Govardhan hill that crowns the lintel of the vestibule provokes us to read the history of art and materiality beyond such binaries.61 Framed by panels depicting narratives from Krishna’s life, representations of devotees, and decorative patterns such as lotus bands, the lunette-­shaped relief can be read as germane to a geoaesthetic that operates against the binaries of discrete arenas designated as land or landscape, the natural environment or art (figure 2.13). Stylistically, the relief bears a resemblance to contemporaneous paintings from the Kachhwaha capital of Amber, highlighting the intermediatic syntax of late sixteenth-­and early seventeenth-­century painting and sculpture.62 Consider, for instance, a ca. 1610 folio depicting Krishna and a group of cowherds dancing in a courtyard from an illustrated Amber manuscript of the Connoisseur’s Delights (Rasikapriyā; 1591 CE), the Orchha poet Keshavdas’ 78  chap ter t wo

2.12. (Left) Doorway to antechamber, Govind Dev Temple, Vrindavan, 1590. 2.13. (Below) Krishna holding Govardhan. Lintel on antechamber doorway, Govind Dev Temple, Vrindavan, 1590.

l and   79

2.14. Krishna dancing. Page from the Dispersed “Boston” Rasika­ priya¯, ca. 1610. Ink, opaque watercolor, and gold on paper, 22.9 × 14.3 cm. Verso. Repository: Rogers Fund, 1918. (18.85.5a), The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.

magnum opus on devotional aesthetics that had become immensely popular across north and central India in this period (figure 2.14).63 While the cowherds wear robes that would characteristically be seen in contemporaneous Mughal portraiture, Krishna is depicted in both the Govind Dev lintel and the painting as bare-­chested except for a flowing scarf wrapped around his torso. In both instances, the hieratic figure of the deity is adorned with a crown of peacock feathers, while the lower garment—a flared dancing skirt (kachhani) covering loosely fitting trousers—reiterates connections across media and regional centers in the early modern period. But the most astonishing aspect of Govind Dev Temple is the very presence of the Govardhan hill relief on the antechamber.64 Most temples dedicated 80  chap ter t wo

to Vishnu, from the sixth century onward, would characteristically have had a figure of Garuda, Vishnu’s mount, or Vishnu himself resting on the cosmic snake as the central image on the door lintel (lalatabimba) to mark the denomination of the temple.65 The icon on the lintel, in that sense, operates as a signifier. While sculptures of Krishna holding Govardhan hill were carved on ancillary walls of temples, for instance at the ca. seventh-­century Upper Shivalaya Temple in Badami and the twelfth-­century Hoysalesvara Temple in Halebid, this was the first instance ever of the narrative being represented on the lintel of a doorway. Situated at the juncture of two worlds, the mundane and the spiritual, the antarala (antechamber; literally, “intermediate space”) marks the passage from the everyday to the sacred. The sculpture program of the antechamber doorway also functions as an iconostasis, that is, a screen with images separating the sanctuary from the nave, reaffirming the temple as a space of pilgrimage, community, and the abode of the deity in his embodied form. As a liminal precinct between two realms, the iconostasis thus functions as a space to literally chart this manifold symbolism upon its surface. Reading the sculpture panels on Govind Dev doorway from left to right, we accordingly begin at the bottom, with a panel depicting Krishna and Radha flanked by devotees. As our eyes travel upward along the projecting vertical frieze interspersed with leonine figures and peacocks, we see narratives of Krishna’s life in Braj. We see Yasodha, Krishna’s foster mother, churning milk in a large earthen vessel while the infant Krishna tries to steal the milk in a moment of mischievous play (figure 2.15). Other episodes, such as Krishna courting the cowherd women (gopis) of Braj and Yasodha affectionately tending to the infant, are repeated on both sides of the doorway, reminding the devotee of the locational sanctity of both the temple and the site of Vrindavan where the temple was situated. The inner band paralleling the principal frieze depicts sculptures of ascetics and cowherd women with folded hands. It is this frieze that connects to the horizontal lintel, in effect framing the doorway through which one would first glance at the enshrined deity of Govind Dev. The horizontal lintel, too, has sculptures of dancing cowherd women in architectonic compartments interposed with blooming lotuses. The inner frieze could then be seen as the rasa mandala, the circular dance of divine love, of Krishna and the cowherd women during an enchanted autumn night. According to the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, the dance culminates with the gopis forming a circle around Krishna.66 Indeed, paintings depicting the rasa mandala from the sixteenth century onward show Krishna in the center of the enchanted circle. One of the first visual representations of this particular mandala can be found in the ca. 1520–40 Bhāgavata Purāṇa from Palam, a manuscript we encountered in the previous chapter.67 In time, the image as a metaphor for the union between the devotee and the divine was frequently depicted in illustrated manuscripts as well as in murals on temples and palace walls (see figure 4.22). But in this instance, the doorway l and   81

2.15. Yasodha, Krishna’s foster mother, churning milk. Detail of antechamber doorway, Govind Dev Temple, Vrindavan, 1590.

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2.16. Ground plan, Govind Dev Temple, Vrindavan, 1590. Based on plan in Cole, Illustrations of Buildings near Muttra, No. 1–69.

itself operated as that cosmogram. Similar to a torana, the doorway was not only a framing device to behold the deity enshrined in the sanctum but was also part of an iconographic program that integrated the iconostasis with the sanctum. The dual function of the antechamber door as an apparatus of enframement and a sculptural metamorphosis of the temple’s symbolic purport materializes if one can imagine the devotee ritually passing through the cavernous 35.5-­ meter central pavilion (mandapa) to reach the vestibule from where one would first behold the consecrated embryonic space of the sanctum (garbhagriha) where the icon of Govind Dev resides (figure 2.16). The devotee would surely be cognizant that the temple was on the precise site where Rupa Goswami built his first temple to Govind Dev in 1535. The devotee would also be aware that Gaudiya theologians visualized the low hill on which the temple stands l and   83

as the meeting place of Radha and Krishna, the epicenter of the lotus that was the pilgrimage site of Braj.68 But along with the symbolic significance of the icon and the site, it was the large relief of Krishna lifting Govardhan hill on top of the lintel that would be most perceptible from the threshold of the temple. Crowning the doorway, this was the first time that a relief of Krishna lifting Govardhan hill had been placed so conspicuously. At the same time, could we read the iconostasis in relation to Govardhan ridge, a few miles west of the 1590 Govind Dev Temple? The figurative connotation of the diverse parts of a temple would support such a reading. The sanctum (garbhagriha), as art historians note through a close reading of architectural treatises and theological texts, was imagined as a dark embryonic cave.69 Returning to Govind Dev, one can then find a dense elemental bind that holds together the imagination of the sanctum as a cave and the relief of Krishna lifting a hill on the vestibule. Krishna, according to the Dynasty of Hari, lifted Govardhan hill from a cave below the ridge. It is this narrative that seems to have been transplanted on the walls of the 1590 temple. Thus, standing at the entrance of the vestibule, one would have seen the monumental relief sculpture of Krishna lifting Govardhan hill placed directly above the diminutive, dark, cave-­like sanctum where the icon of Govind Dev dwelled. The sanctum, however, is no longer extant. Thus, the dynamic of viewership described here can only be recovered by way of retrospective imagination and via the temple’s ground plan (see figure 2.16). Symbolically, the lofty superstructure of a temple is an ideational pillar, the axis mundi that holds the filament of the universe, and the sanctum, the cosmic depths from which the pillar emerges. As an organizing principle, the superstructure as a pillar is a vital force of energy identical to the tree of life or the cosmic lotus from which life begins.70 Drawing to the fore consanguinities between architecture and cosmogonic space, the metaphor of the cave and the mountain that was intrinsic to the geo-­architectural morphology of the Hindu temple was visually mapped out on the surface of Govind Dev Temple. The temple could then be seen as an architectonic recreation of both the pilgrimage site of Govardhan and a restaging of the narrative of Krishna lifting the hill. Given that the Gaudiyas had lost control over the site of Govardhan only a decade before the completion of Govind Dev, this ingenious iconographic program becomes even more compelling. During an era of diminishing resources and cataclysmic natural catastrophes, it is easy to see how the temple’s iconographic program, the sacrality of the site, and the conspicuous gifts it received from the Mughals and the Kachhwahas would have functioned as mnemonic strategies to reclaim authority within the sacred topos of Braj. The relief on the lintel was perhaps subsequently erected to reiterate the symbolic, ritual, and spatial preeminence of Govind Dev in anticipation of counterpoising the loss of Govardhan.

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2.17. Rock sample from Govardhan hill. Photo courtesy Julie Wolf.

This palimpsest of the temple and the mountain can be further elaborated if we return to the narrative of Krishna raising Govardhan hill. The Dynasty of Hari tells us that Krishna stood still like a rising pillar of stone (saila stambha) beneath Govardhan hill, holding the ridge on his hand.71 In the text, Krishna’s anthropomorphic shape consequently assumes cosmic dimensions as he is envisaged as a lithic column connecting the three worlds. The material of stone and the material that constitutes the divine body merge to transform Govardhan hill into a sacred relic, immanent with vital force. The hill is no longer inert matter. Rather, obscuring object-­subject binaries, it is the very substance of quartzite rock that is entangled in relational circulatory flows that intimately connects representation, theology, and the natural environment. Rock, a naturally occurring solid aggregate of one or more minerals or mineraloids, lies at the core of this account. Constituted of mylonitized reddish quartzitic sandstone, Govardhan hill is the easternmost exposure of the Precambrian rock formation known as the Delhi Supergroup, an outcrop that extends 350 miles northeastward from the Aravalli mountain range in Rajasthan to Delhi (figure 2.17).72 Colonial geological surveys of Mathura indicate that the sandstone of Govardhan ridge was “fit for building purposes.”73 Yet it seems that the sandstone, rich in detrital quartz, potassium feldspar, and small amounts of argillaceous material, was not quarried “owing to the religious sanctity” of the hill.74 Thus, although by 1911, sandstone from other parts of the Mathura District was being industrially extracted by the British government and private firms for the construction of bridges and public works as well as for commercial sale, the colonial authorities were careful not to remove stone from Govardhan ridge.75

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2.18. The worship of Govardhan hill.

European tourists traveling to Braj in the nineteenth century reiterate the injunction on taking stone from the hill. Visiting Govardhan in 1875, Mrs. J. C. Murray Aynsley writes, “So holy is this hill esteemed, that not a morsel of the stone is allowed to be taken for building purposes; and even the road, which crosses the ridge at its lowest point, where only a few bits of rock are visible, had to be carried over them by a paved causeway.”76 Even today, pilgrims are discouraged from climbing Govardhan hill, a practice that is traced in local oral narratives to Chaitanya’s refusal to climb the hill when he visited the site in 1514. Entangling rock and the divine body, the worship of Govardhan then involved imagining the hill as Krishna himself. Innumerable makeshift shrines border the ridge (figure 2.18). In each instance, it is fragments of the bedrock scattered alongside the route of circumambulation that is ritually adorned by pilgrims with flowers and incense and offered fire from the camphor lamp, attesting to the practice of visualizing Govardhan ridge as Krishna. One could contend that it was the alchemical quality of stone as elemental matter (dhatu) that concurrently made Govardhan hill a sacred site and a living

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being. In Rupa Goswami’s Splendid Sapphire (Ujjvalanīlamaṇi), a sixteenth-­ century text that describes the eroticized relationship between Krishna and his devotees, Radha, Krishna’s consort, proclaims on beholding the quartzite stone of Govardhan, “So lovely that they eclipse the charm of the fireflies’ light, these mineral pigments [dhatu] are known to beautify the transcendental body of Krishna. These pigments make me passionately thirsty to see Him.”77 That stone was animate matter—immanent with energy and capable of arousing desire—is repeatedly attested in Vaishnava texts.78 It is important to note here that the Splendid Sapphire, a text that by its very name reveals a careful attention to lapidary and the metaphysical power of stone, focuses on the efficacy of the minerals (dhatu) that constitute the quartzite ridge. The rock/divine-­body assemblage, then, acts as generative matter with elemental agency. According to local legends, Govardhan hill bled when workmen struck the bedrock while digging a well on the ridge.79 That night, Krishna appeared in a dream to the workmen, explaining that their tools had cut his body and that they should refrain from further construction on the hill. While the origin of this narrative cannot be traced back to sixteenth-­century texts with certainty, priests at the site reiterate the account to pilgrims to affirm, in Jane Bennett’s words, “the vitality of matter and the lively powers of material formations.”80 Here, dreams, visions, and apparitions provide tangible routes to establish ecological relations between disparate entities. While the arena for interaction between a rock/divine-­body assemblage and humans is limited under ordinary circumstances, dreams—metaphoric or otherwise—open unexpected thresholds where it is possible for the hill as Krishna to communicate and enunciate distress at human interventions on the natural environment. This form of communication also allows for an intersubjective arena to emerge where relations between humans and the environment shape a cosmological continuum at odds with our current anthropocentric definitions of both nature and culture.81 “Nature” could then function simultaneously as a finite resource and be part of a system where subject-­object binaries become obscure. Extant nineteenth-­century liturgical paintings offer a visual archive to explore artistic depictions of this rock/divine-­body assemblage. The ca. 1830– 50 painting reproduced here, for instance, illustrates the key pilgrimage sites in Braj (figure 2.19). Hung behind the icon of Shrinathji while the pilgrimage to Braj occurs in September and October each year under the aegis of the Pushtimarg priests, the 168 × 120 cm pichvai (literally, “displayed at the back”) was meant to evoke the experience of the Braj pilgrimage for those who could not participate in the journey. The pichvai thus played an important role in aiding the ritualistic beholding of the icon by suggesting the specific mood or emotion of viewing.82 In this instance, the painting was meant to evoke the act of traveling through the sacred groves of Braj. While representations of

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2.19. Pichvai for circumambulation of Braj, Nathdwara, ca. 1830–50. Opaque watercolor, gold and silver on cotton, 168 × 120 cm. Private Collection. Photo © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images.

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Govardhan hill in liturgical paintings are characteristically delineated with thick undulating strokes of paint that emulate the rocky surface of the ridge, the artist of this pichvai meticulously painted the icon of Shrinathji as the hill (see figure C.8 for an example). Conflating the body of Shrinathji with the body of Govardhan hill, the pichvai enumerates the persistent continuance of an early modern intersubjective cosmology well into the nineteenth century. As a testament to a creative practice that does not demarcate culture from nature or the environment as an autonomous sphere, the painting also suggests that the idea of the landscape as a modern Western modality of representing land was by no means widely shared. But how do we absorb the Govind Dev lintel in this account of agentive rock that bleeds when injured, a rock that stimulates yearning for the divine? The eco-­moral decree that prohibited extracting stone from Govardhan hill prevented the colonial government from quarrying the ridge. In the late sixteenth century, the Gaudiya community lost its right to worship the ridge when the Pushtimarg priests, with support from the Mughal throne, ousted them from the site. It is at this very moment that Govind Dev was constructed to reposition Vrindavan as the key sacred site in Braj. Liturgy was marshaled to make the temple the pivotal center of Braj. According to a contemporaneous inscription on the temple wall, Govind Dev was built on the yogapitha, the precise place of the intimate union of Radha and Krishna, that was the center of Braj visualized as a cosmographic lotus mandala with a thousand petals.83 Significant support in terms of bequests from the Kachhwahas and other north Indian kingdoms consequently made Govind Dev one of the most important temples in the region. The materiality of the red sandstone that was used to construct the temple perhaps played an operative role in shaping the theological and political prominence of Govind Dev. On the one hand, the stone that was used to erect the temple was procured from the same quarries that had provided the sandstone for much of contemporaneous Mughal structures. Thus, the architectonic correlation between Akbar’s imperial architecture and Govind Dev, alongside inscriptions chiseled on the walls of the temple praising the Mughal emperor, clearly located Govind Dev within an imperial paradigm of power and authority. On the other hand, contemporaneous liturgical texts cogently laid out the theological function of the color red as the color of passion, a color that can stimulate love for Krishna in the mind of the devotee.84 The red sandstone of Govind Dev was thus implicated within a sacramental milieu that envisaged chromaticity as agentive in its ability to incite desire. At the same time, the unanticipated inclusion of Govardhan ridge on the doorway to the vestibule made possible a claim to the reddish-­hued hill as a field of desire that could be easily relocated. In texts, Govardhan ridge is attributed with incredible mobility.85 But it would be misleading to read the

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relief only as an act of visual representation or a symbolic claim to sacred space. The claim was at the level of the elemental, based on the belief that stone as embodied matter had agentive power. The transfiguration of a temple into an embodied hill could only occur through a metaphysics of presence or immanence that asserted stone as the transubstantiated form of Krishna. While the concept-­term transubstantiation has a specific Christian genealogy that conceivably takes us back to St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, the Gaudiyas in Braj contended that Vrindavan was abhinna (nondifferent) from the body of Krishna.86 Consequently, the very touch of its dust was redemptive. Note that yet again, dust—airborne particles of the earth—is invoked as embodied agentive matter. Prakasa-­visesa—“extraordinary manifestation”— was the precise term employed by mid-­sixteenth-­century Gaudiya theologians such as Jiva Goswami (1513–98), the nephew of Rupa Goswami who had established the first Govind Dev Temple in 1535, to recognize Vrindavan in north India as indistinguishable from the heavenly Vrindavan where Krishna plays eternally.87 It was the yogapitha, the place of the union of Radha and Krishna, on which Govind Dev Temple was built that was then claimed as the supreme abode of Govinda. Employing an architectural metaphor, pilgrimage manuals such as the Srivṛndāvanmāhātmyam, a text that praises the glories of Vrindavan, described the yogapitha—the seat (pitha) of union (yoga)—as an octagonal structure located in the center of Vrindavan that was the pericarp of the cosmographic lotus mandala of Braj.88 It was no coincidence that the present Govind Dev Temple was built in Vrindavan at a time when Gaudiya texts were being written by Rupa’s nephew Jiva Goswami to dexterously reposition the town as the epicenter of Braj. To further validate the cosmological cartographies conjured up in Jiva Goswami’s text, the temple’s sanctum was built on an uncharacteristic octagonal plinth. In effect, in sixteenth-­century Braj, texts and temple architecture were brought into a close bind to shape embodied space. Having first established the cosmological significance of the site on which Govind Dev was built, the linkage between Govardhan ridge and the sculpture on the vestibule of the temple was subsequently produced through lithic affinities. Thus, the deep-­red quartzite ridge, a peripatetic animate being that was attributed extraordinary locomotive capacities, could appear in Vrindavan even as it remained rooted in Govardhan. Much like the pilgrimage center of Vrindavan that could concurrently be present in the terrestrial and the celestial realm, Govind Dev, constructed from the same sandstone that constituted the ridge, could then assume Govardhan’s alchemical potency, not figuratively, but at the level of the mineralogical. Indeed, Chaitanya’s adulation of Govardhan ridge as the embodiment of Krishna extended beyond the hill to its stone, which he worshipped as the body of Krishna. Chaitanya wore a

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small piece of rock from the ridge around his neck as a talisman. “Sometimes,” Chaitanya’s early seventeenth-­century biography recounts, the mystic “held the Govarddhana-­śilā [stone] before his eyes, and sometimes to his heart, and sometimes to his nose to smell it, and sometimes he put it on his head. He always wet the śilā with the waters of his tears, and Prabhu [Chaitanya] called the śilā the body of Krṣṇa.”89 Subsequently, Chaitanya gave the specific stone to his disciples with instructions to worship it as Krishna himself. Like two mirrors that infinitely reflect each other to a point where it becomes impossible to discern an original image, Govardhan hill and Govind Dev were intimately bound in the generative vibrancy of alchemic stone. For our purposes, the lintel at Govind Dev Temple also opens up art history to a methodological palimpsest of the artistic and the elemental power of stone. The animate efficacy of Govind Dev’s sandstone, then, provides us with a schema through which the very function of architecture can be re-­ theorized from an ecocritical perspective. Sixteenth-­century speculations on the embodied materiality of red sandstone in Braj led to the establishment of a new iconography of imagining the sacred hill. Thus, the 1627 Jugal Kishor Temple built in Vrindavan by Naunkaran, an officer who had served under Akbar, also had a relief on its front façade of Krishna lifting Govardhan hill (figure 2.20). Much like the Govind Dev lintel, the relief on Jugal Kishor Temple depicts Krishna, flanked by devotees, peacocks, and cows, lifting Govardhan hill. Enclosed within a schematized arch both denoting and becoming the ridge, the narrative reminds the viewer that Krishna had emerged from a cave below Govardhan hill (figure 2.21). A new iconography of representing embodied space was conceptualized in sixteenth-­century Braj in a moment of immense ecological transformations. The architectural materialization of the hill’s personhood thus became the site at which to experience the natural environment’s subjectivity that was formed through a cosmological interweaving of body and space.

The Hindu Temple after Eco Art History Rocks are purportedly inert. Yet in early modern South Asia, stone was perceived as immanent with vital energy. The particular history of agentive rocks and its relation to architecture in the pilgrimage center of Braj was not the only instance of a precolonial imaginary that negotiated aesthetic practices with the effervescent power of the earth’s natural formation. In the recent past, scholars have excavated the vital role of rocks, stones, and gems in diverse milieus that range from Inka architecture to medieval lapidaries in Europe.90 In South Asia, recent histories of the early modern period have likewise brought to the forefront the crucial role of stones in the systematic self-­fashioning of Mughal sovereignty.91 Obscuring the boundaries between art and the natural

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2.20. Jugal Kishor Temple, Vrindavan, 1627.

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2.21. Krishna holding Govardhan. Lintel on doorway, Jugal Kishor Temple, Vrindavan, 1627.

environment, animate beings and inanimate matter, recent engagements with the epistemic subjectivity of rocks have thus allowed us to explore the contours of an eco art history. The idea of the Hindu temple seems predisposed to such a revisionist analysis. Even though caves carved out of living rock were used by Buddhists, Jains, and other religious sects, such as the Ajivikas, from as early as the mid-­third century BCE, freestanding lithic temples built specifically for the purpose of housing icons emerged as a distinctive architectural typology only in the fourth and the fifth centuries. Over the next three hundred years or so, experimentations with form and iconography led to the structured formalization of the north Indian temple, with its distinctive curvilinear stone superstructure. From this formative period to the early modern Islamicate temples that we have encountered here, the study of Hindu temple architecture has, by now, generated a vast and rich historiography.92

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Yet as early as 1946, the Vienna-­trained art historian Stella Kramrisch wrote, “Stone as part of the earth shares in the rites due to it. . . . Stone, severed from the rock, taken from its site, is transformed in its nature, alike to the wood, when it becomes the substance of which the temple is built, imbued as are the bricks, with its indwelling Essence.”93 Drawing from a range of architecture treatises and philosophical texts, Kramrisch’s monumental The Hindu Temple established the methodological foundation for subsequent studies on temple architecture in South Asia. Perhaps it was her training at the University of Vienna under Joseph Strzygowski that provided Kramrisch with the disciplinary tools of formalism, symbolism, and iconographic analyses to unravel the allegorical significance of the idea of the Hindu temple in South Asia.94 For Kramrisch, lithic temples were the metaphoric transformation of the earth into architecture. Following Kramrisch, histories of architecture over the last few decades have routinely emphasized the symbolic nature of temples as a figurative representation of the universe, a microcosmic symbol of the primordial macrocosm. While the new historicism of post-­1980s art history has introduced questions of power, patronage, and politics in the historiography of Hindu temple architecture, it is only in the recent past that art historians and conservators have turned to stone to analyze artistic techniques, processes of carving, histories of quarrying, circulation and trading networks, and the material physicality of lithic sculpture and architecture, among other themes.95 Such studies, though, are rare. Even today, most interpretations of the physical form of the temple customarily slip back to Kramrisch’s formative reading of the temple as a metaphysical symbol. An eco art history, in contrast, demands that we take the vagaries of the natural environment as constitutive rather than emblematic. The narrative of agentive rocks and shape-­shifting architectural reliefs delineated here thus fundamentally departs from older histories of temple architecture to foreground linkages among climate change during the Little Ice Age, the materiality of quartzite stone, and architecture. While at the first glance it might seem unfeasible, even incongruous, to relate climate change to transformations in theology and temple architecture, an eco art history can become operative only when the history of art and architecture brings together and reconciles phenomenology with the matter that forms the natural environment. Such a gesture can have significant implications on how we engage with the materiality of artistic and architectural practices, in process problematizing the purported rift between nature and culture, which, as we now know, was an invention of a Westernist rationality that had emerged in seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century natural philosophy.96 This is not to suggest that the pre-­ Enlightenment world was one in which the human species lived in harmony with the natural environment. Rather, the methodologies of eco art history

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might allow us to rethink stone as not just material that leads to art histories of human labor, trade, production, and technology but as material imbued with agency and caught up in processual flows. It is in the conjoining of material and materiality, the physical and the phenomenological, that stone becomes more than itself. Stone, aligned differently, becomes effervescent matter with the potential to unravel the ostensible dichotomies between nature and culture that haunt our anthropogenic present.

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three | forest You have seen the forest, adorned with flowers, colored by the rays of the full moon, and made beautiful by the blossoms of the trees quivering playfully in the breeze of the Yamuna¯ river.—Bh¯agavata Pur¯an¸a (Ancient Tales of the Lord)

That the ecosphere of early modern Braj was rich in biodiversity is apparent from sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century accounts. Imperial Mughal records inform us that the forests in and around the pilgrimage center were a favored hunting ground for the emperor Akbar.1 Akbar’s son Jahangir, too, noted that his wife, Nur Jahan (1577–1645), known for her dexterous aim, shot a lion near Mathura on October 23, 1620.2 In 1634, the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (1592– 1666) killed as many as four lions in a forest near Mahavan, six miles southeast of Mathura.3 Contemporaneous European accounts, for instance by the French physician François Bernier, also describe Braj as a forest covered with “copse wood” and dense wild grass growing up to two meters in height.4 Although the fertile floodplains directly alongside the river Yamuna witnessed intensive agriculture from the sixteenth century onward, these semiarid areas, where uncultivated shrubs grew alongside dry deciduous trees such as the dhok (Anogeissus pendula) and the babul (Acacia nilotica), lay at a slight distance from the river’s flood catchment area.5 Here, travelers and pilgrims encountered animals such as lions, blackbucks, and gazelles. The exponential development of towns and villages in Braj over the subsequent years would drastically alter the region’s fragile ecosystem. In the 1740s, for instance, three families built several palaces and temples in Barsana, a village twenty miles north of Mathura, where Radha, Krishna’s consort, supposedly spent her childhood (figure 3.1). At that time, Barsana was still a somewhat small, nondescript settlement. But almost overnight, Frederic S. Growse notes, “a hamlet became . . . the center of a princely court crowded with magnificent buildings.”6 By the 1750s, with rapidly expanding towns and villages, 97

3.1. View of Barsana.

much of the area’s low scrub forests had also been brought under cultivation. Mid-­eighteenth-­century taxation records provide a clear history of the conversion of the brushwood in Braj into cultivable land with a concurrent increase in population. The transformation was rapid. In 1724, only 36 percent of agricultural land in the pargana, a local administrative unit, of Mathura was used for growing legumes such as gram; by 1735, as much as 66 percent of the land had been allocated for cultivation.7 Indeed, the considerable intensification in agriculture in this period paralleled the rise in the price of land; while in 1654, one bigha of cultivatable land in Vrindavan sold for Rs. 13.33, by 1702 the price had risen to Rs. 20.36.8 How did this sweeping alteration in the region’s agrolandscape transform poetic and artistic visualizations of Braj as the sylvan wilderness where Krishna roamed with his beloved Radha? Let us take Vrindavan—the forest (vana) of the goddess Vrinda—as an example. While texts such as the Dynasty of Hari describe Vrindavan as a “pleasant forest covered with bountiful grass” where Krishna danced ecstatically with his devotees, the etymology of the term connotes a forest (vana) used by an assembly (vrinda) of ascetics.9 At some point, the word vrinda, which literally means “multitude,” was used to denote tulsi (sacred basil, Ocimum sanctum), a perennial plant belonging to the basil or Lamiaceae family. Although scholars are uncertain about precisely when this etymological shift occurred, the direct association between the aromatic medicinal herb and the 98  chap ter three

site of Vrindavan can be seen in texts composed in sixteenth-­century Braj.10 In sixteenth-­century Vaishnava liturgy, the goddess Vrinda appears in the anthropomorphized form of tulsi. Rupa Goswami, the Gaudiya ascetic who established the temple dedicated to Govind Dev in 1535, is believed to have discovered an icon of the goddess and subsequently placed it in an ancillary shrine in the temple in Vrindavan. In turn, the icon became the presiding force in Vrindavan, with the forest (vana) named after her. In liturgical texts, this geobotanical conception of the forest accrued further indexical density. A categorical distinction, for instance, was made between the jangala and the vana. The vana referred to the wider circle of woodlands or forests around a village from where one collected natural resources such as medicinal herbs, firewood, and honey.11 It was in these woodlands that travelers in the sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries would encounter lions and other animals. In contrast, the word jangala, from which the English word jungle is derived, had a distinctly different nuance. While the Sanskrit word jangala signified arid drylands suitable for human settlement, the Oxford English Dictionary indicates that when the word first appeared in English in the eighteenth century, its meaning had already been altered to describe tropical landmasses covered by impenetrable trees with thick foliage.12 Following earlier Sanskritic phytogeographic imaginaries, the word jangala was used in sixteenth-­century Braj to describe the larger political and administrative milieu—that is, arid drylands suitable for human settlement—that stretched across north India. Rupa Goswami’s 1541 The Ocean of the Essence of Devotional Rasa states, “Seeing Kṛṣṇa, whom they had never seen before, the people of the jungle [jangala] experienced a softening of the heart and were unable to draw their eyes from Him.”13 Similarly, the Performance of Devotion to Hari notes, “Bathing in the Ganga at Prayag, at Gaya, at Naimisa, at Puskar and at places in the Kuru Jangala destroys a person’s sinful reactions after a long time but the water that has washed the lotus feet of the Supreme Lord immediately purifies one.”14 Here, jangala is the name given to the territory in north India governed by the Kurus. In contrast, the vana denoted the forests in the pilgrimage center of Braj where Krishna, the cowherd, tended cattle. According to pilgrimage manuals such as the 1552 Devotional Enjoyments of Braj, one of the most elaborate texts ever written on the sacred geography of Braj, a pilgrimage to the region entailed visiting over one hundred vanas, including Mahavan, the great forest, and Vrindavan, the forest of the goddess Vrinda.15 It was in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that a different phytogeographic imaginary gained prominence. In a time of massive encroachment on the forests of Braj from expanding towns and increasing agriculture, the geobotanical term kunja rapidly gained a new prominence in the region’s literary cultures. Although the word kunja entered Vaishnava poetic cultures as early as the twelfth century with Jayadeva’s Songs of Govinda fore s t   99

3.2. Nihalchand (attr.), The Bower of Quiet Passion, Kishangarh, ca. 1745–50. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper, 22.86 × 31.75 cm. Repository: The San Diego Museum of Art, Edwin Binney 3rd Collection, 1990.756. Photo courtesy The San Diego Museum of Art.

and was already in use in sixteenth-­century Braj, writers such as Lokanatha (fl. 1725) and Premadasa (fl. 1734) of Braj revisualized the pilgrimage center as a kunja, or a verdant bower, in the early eighteenth century.16 This conception of the kunja was far removed from the quotidian reality of the region’s significantly altered eighteenth-­century agroecological system. It is this notion of the kunja that also reshaped eighteenth-­century art and architecture. Consider, for instance, a ca. 1745–50 painting attributed to the artist Nihalchand (fl. 1725–82) from the kingdom of Kishangarh in western India (figure 3.2). The artist depicts Vrindavan as a kunja, the primeval bower that was the site for Krishna and Radha’s divine love. His patron, Savant Singh (1699–1764), the ruler of Kishangarh and a devout Vaishnava, had relinquished his throne and moved to Vrindavan. Painted after Savant Singh’s pilgrimage to Vrindavan and the 1730 construction of a royal temple in the town, the lyrical watercolor offers a glimpse of a new imagination of the natural topography of Braj.17 A verse 100  chap ter three

on the reverse of the painting describes the dawn after a night of passionate love in a bower when attendant women tenderly awaken the fervent lovers by playing a musical raga.18 While the verse does not explicitly describe the bower, it is of significance to us that the artist Nihalchand conceived the topography of the kunja as a dense arbor where the viewer is not able to see the ground on which Krishna and Radha lie. Instead of depicting the disappearing, dry, deciduous woodlands and scrub forest that was the natural cover in this ecoregion, the artist presents a verdant, overgrown thicket that is more akin to the tropical jungle of our contemporary imagination. The thick application of several layers of pigment serves to bring to the painterly surface the seemingly impenetrable density of lush foliage. Nihalchand’s kunja was indicative of a larger turn in painting and architectural practices that underscored an aesthetics of imagined vegetal abundance. Unlike the depiction of forests in earlier illustrated manuscripts, such as the Isarda Bhāgavata, or the restrained use of motifs, such as lotus medallions and floriated creepers, in sixteenth-­and early seventeenth-­century temples in Braj, the profusion of floral ornamentation in post-­1750s art and architecture was unprecedented. Crucially, this vegetal aesthetics of abundance developed in Braj at a time of considerable global advancement in botany and modern plant sciences. By the eighteenth century, imperial botany had emerged as one of the principle techniques of knowing, archiving, and governing the natural worlds of colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The exploration and exploitation of Spain’s territories in the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Philippines led to the establishment of new institutions that compiled and deployed knowledge that furthered research in biosciences, medicine, and industry.19 A permanent botanical garden, based on the Jardin du Roi in France, was established in Mauritius in 1735 to experimentally cultivate new crops. The British, too, participated in this race for global bio-­knowledge. In eighteenth-­century England, research in botany and tropical agriculture that was supported by institutions such as the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew (established in 1759) facilitated the production, accumulation, and dissemination of scientific knowledge about plant systems.20 This knowledge, in turn, propelled the exponential expansion of colonial plantations in South Asia and reinforced concomitant extractive economies. The British, however, were not the first to taxonomize and classify plant ecologies of the subcontinent to produce bio-­knowledge in service of the state. The Mughal emperors of South Asia, too, commissioned manuals on medicinal herbs, established gardens, and hybridized plants in order to manage and master the natural environment.21 Mughal attempts to both visualize and establish large-­scale gardens was an imperial technique aimed at controlling the natural environment by reordering it. The emperor Babur himself described his 1504 renovations to the Istalif garden, eighteen miles northwest of Kabul, in the fore s t   101

following terms: “A one-­mill stream flows constantly from the middle of the garden. . . . The stream used to run higgledy-­piggledly until I ordered it to be straightened. Now it is a beautiful place.”22 The garden, with its streams, was thus a visual manifestation of Babur’s power and authority mapped out—quite literally—onto the very land controlled by the emperor. An account of the vegetal aesthetics that materialized in eighteenth-­century Braj, in contrast, brings to the fore practices that have been sidelined by scholarship on early modern plant cultures. With an emphasis on large-­scale imperial systems, art histories of post-­sixteenth-­century South Asia have largely tended to focus on Mughal gardens, the colonial picturesque, gardens established by British botanists, and the depiction of plants in painting as a form of far-­reaching environmental governance.23 In its place, a focus on what the historian Ranajit Guha has described as “the small voice of history” allows us to underscore the function of the gestural, the corporeal, and the ritualized in the era of early modern scientificism.24 Vegetal aesthetics, as articulated in eighteenth-­century Braj, thus also allow us to explore ideations of the environment that were not framed by the intersecting forces of science, commerce, and the statist discourse of either Mughal or colonial plant sciences. Rather, constituted through an array of Vaishnava textual and artistic ruminations, the topographies of affection in Braj engendered a specific imagination of the kunja as an enchanted bower. In what follows, we will track the aesthetic transformations that occurred as the kunja, a dense bower overgrown with creepers and vines, provided both a space of withdrawal from the everyday agropastoral domain of the vana and a palpable architectonic system that allowed for the establishment of a new artistic paradigm.

Bowers of Stone In the 1750s, Ganga Rani, the wife of Suraj Mal (r. 1755–63), the ruler of the kingdom of Bharatpur, constructed a large sandstone temple in Vrindavan facing the river Yamuna (figure 3.3).25 Gangamohan Kunj was the first temple in Braj to depart from an earlier architecture vocabulary of red sandstone, austere surfaces, and restrained ornamentation that had been established in the sixteenth century with the construction of the Sati Burj in 1570 (see figure 1.3). One enters Ganga Rani’s temple through an imposing, three-­story gateway framed by arched niches with elevated podiums (figure 3.4). Unlike earlier red-­sandstone temples in Vrindavan that were clearly visible from the street, the vertical mass of the monumental gateway functions as a sharp obstruction, hindering any attempt to see the temple from outside the sacred precinct. According to the local community, the arched entrance, flanked by two large, raised porches, known as the otla, constitutes a space of purification, marking a firm separation between the sacred and the profane. The devotee, while entering the temple, is expected to pause at the entrance, sit in the porch 102  chap ter three

3.3. (Above) Gangamohan Kunj, Vrindavan, ca. 1750. 3.4. (Left) Gateway, Gangamohan Kunj, Vrindavan, ca. 1750.

fore s t   103

3.5. Sanctum, Gangamohan Kunj, Vrindavan, ca. 1750.

for a moment to contemplate and remove all impure thoughts, and eventually step forward into the realm of the divine.26 Offering a transitional space between the temple and the street, the gateway creates a liminal threshold between the inside and the outside, the sequestered and the public, and the sacred and the non-­sacred. Passing through the gateway, one immediately steps into a large open courtyard that is currently a playground for children from a neighborhood school. Yet textual sources inform us that most eighteenth-­century temples in Braj, Gangamohan Kunj among them, had a dense overgrown bower, or kunja, leading to the sanctum.27 One imagines the devotee traversing a dense cluster of trees, shrubs, and fragrant vines that would have covered the now-­barren courtyard of Gangamohan Kunj. The façade of the temple sanctum, too, is entirely covered with delicate flowering buds and tendrilled plants. Floral vines unfold across the arches of the central altar, while perforated stone screens with vegetal motifs enclose the two subsidiary shrines (figure 3.5). Bowls laden with succulent fruits, vases with fragrant flowers, and two peacocks carved in low relief below the central canopy complete this image of a verdant bower. 104  chap ter three

Protected from prying eyes by thick masonry walls and the massive gateway, the act of traveling through the bower to reach the bejeweled floriated shrine might have been an attempt to savor, at least in part, Radha’s journey through the kunja for an intimate union with Krishna. The narrator in Jayadeva’s Songs of Govinda, a twelfth-­century poem on the love of Krishna and Radha that was fundamental to eighteenth-­century imaginaries of the bower, thus advises Radha: Leave your noisy anklets! They clang like traitors in love play. Go to the darkened thicket [kunja], friend! Hide in a cloak of night! In woods on the wind-­swept Jumna [Yamuna] bank Krishna waits in wildflower garlands.28 The phenomenology of this mystic journey, it seems, was mapped onto the real space of Gangmohan Kunj, where the devotee, like Radha, crossed the dense bowers in the courtyard to reach Krishna in his pavilion of wild flowers, albeit in stone. While eighteenth-­century religious imaginaries structured an experience of the temple as a verdant bower, the architecture had its origins in imperial Mughal typologies that by then had permeated the courtly cultures of emergent regional kingdoms. Thus, before we turn to the Vaishnava phytogeographic imaginaries that were intrinsic to the tectonics of built form, it is necessary to locate this new style within the cultural and political milieu within which the temple took shape. Consider, for instance, the front porch of the temple with three cusped arches on carved piers that leads to the sanctum where the icon of Krishna would be placed in a throne-­like alcove framed by baluster columns and a curvilinear baldachin (figure 3.6). The antecedent of this technique of enframement lay in the Mughal-­inspired architecture of contemporaneous regional courts.29 By the early eighteenth century, similar structures embellished with baluster columns, cusped arches, and bulbous domes were being built in numerous palaces and temples in courts ranging from adjacent Bharatpur to the Kachhwaha capital in Jaipur. Indeed, the striking visual resemblance between the gateway to the 1750s Gangamohan Kunj and the gateway to the ca. 1722 Bharatpur Fort built by Suraj Mal’s father Badan Singh (r. 1722–33) in Kumbher, thirty-­one miles southwest of Vrindavan, insinuates that such edifices were part of a new architectural paradigm that had precipitously materialized in the early eighteenth century (figure 3.7). The origin of this new vocabulary lay in the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan’s architecture from the mid-­seventeenth century. Under Shah Jahan’s patronage, imperial architecture had been fundamentally reconceptualized with the introduction of new built forms such as baluster columns based on prints by Albrecht Dürer’s circle and rectangular audience halls with thrones adorned with curvilinear baldachins and effusive pietra dura floral arrangements (figure 3.8). These innovative architectural intercessions served to visualize the fore s t   105

3.6. Central shrine, Gangamohan Kunj, Vrindavan, ca. 1750.

3.7. Gateway, Bharatpur Fort, Kumbher, ca. 1722.

Mughal emperor’s absolute power and were accordingly utilized exclusively for royal edifices.30 Thus, along with a bangla baldachin, a term derived from the curvilinear shape of thatched house roofs in Bengal, we see baluster columns with naturalistic acanthus motifs embellishing the 1648 imperial throne in Shah Jahan’s audience hall in Shahjahanabad Palace in Delhi. Within the realm of Mughal governance, the stylized Düreresque column posited the emperor as a universal sovereign.31 Similarly, naturalistic flowers carved in relief on the pedestal of the throne, also based on European engravings, emphasized the emperor’s throne as a paradise garden on earth that surpassed both the emblematic garden of the Qurʾān and real gardens scattered across the imperium. The white marble throne was, as art historians note, analogous to a bower composed of columns entwined with vines and flowers.32 The bower-­ like throne, in turn, was placed in a red-­sandstone audience hall embellished with floral ornamentation. 106  chap ter three

3.8. Imperial throne, Public Audience Hall (Diwan-i ‘Amm), Shahjahanabad Palace, Delhi, ca. 1638–48.

Although prominent members of the Mughal court consistently used Shah Jahan’s architectural language throughout the late seventeenth century, it was in the early decades of the eighteenth century—when the empire faced severe threat from internal rebellions, fiscal crises, and the advent of a decentralized economy—that imperial motifs such as the baluster column, bangla baldachins, and multi-­cusped arches begin to appear in non-­Muslim structures such as Gangamohan Kunj in Vrindavan.33 In Braj, for instance, Mughal elites such as ‘Abd al-­Nabi Khan, the commandant of Mathura, embellished his 1660–61 Jami Mosque with quadrilateral pavilions decorated with Shah Jahan’s distinctive curvilinear bangla baldachin supported by baluster columns (figure 3.9). Until the construction of Gangamohan Kunj almost one hundred year later, the mosque was the solitary instance of the citation of Shah Jahan’s architectural allegories in the pilgrimage center of Braj. fore s t   107

3.9. Pavilion, Jami Mosque, Mathura, 1660–61.

Elsewhere, the seventeenth-­century Mughal idiom had appeared in Vaishnava contexts somewhat earlier and might have served as an immediate reference for Gangamohan Kunj. For instance, when the Kachhwaha monarch Jai Singh II established a new capital city in Jaipur, he built a single-­story structure with baluster columns to house the icon of Govind Dev, which had been moved from Vrindavan to Jaipur in 1713. With a repeating cusped arched colonnade, Jaipur’s Govind Dev Temple was distinctively different from earlier temples patronized by the Kachhwahas, such as the 1590 Govind Dev in Vrindavan (figure 3.10; also see figure 2.7). Its resemblance to Shah Jahan’s seventeenth-­ century audience hall is striking (figure 3.11). Equally significant was the omission of a sikhara (mountain peak), the soaring superstructure over the temple sanctum symbolizing Mount Meru, the divine residence of the gods. Thus, 108  chap ter three

3.10. Govind Dev Temple, Jaipur, 1735.

housing Govind Dev in a Mughal-­style, colonnaded audience hall, the Kach­ hwahas eventually made the Mughals the source of symbolic legitimacy and power.34 As successor states such as Jaipur gradually asserted their authority in the fragmented world of eighteenth-­century north India, Mughal material culture continued to provide a template—an exemplary paradigm—of courtly practices.35 Yet for our deliberations, it is equally significant that the Kachhwaha rulers attempted to reimagine their newly established capital city of Jaipur as the verdant kunjas of Vrindavan, where Krishna still roams “ever-­blissful.” Describing the city, the eighteenth-­century Jaipur court poet Kavi Atmaram writes: There there were the bowers of karil which were covered by creepers, Here there were the lush maulisiri creepers. There there roamed, his body wrapped in a blanket, Solitary by himself the Ever-­blissful with the cattle.36 The suggestion that even in Jaipur, an exceptional planned city with wide symmetric roads laid out on a rectilinear grid, Krishna roamed in thick bowers resplendent with karil (wild capers, Capparis aphylla) and maulisiri creepers (Mimusops elengi, commonly known as bakul), plants associated with Krishna worship, perhaps rendered the city recognizable within eighteenth-­century geobotanical allegories of the secretive grove. The resonance may have been fore s t   109

3.11. Public Audience Hall (Diwan-i ‘Amm), Shahjahanabad Palace, Delhi, ca. 1638–48.

powerful. For by the 1720s, apart from Govind Dev, five more icons from Vrindavan had made Jaipur their new home.37 The kingdom of Jaipur, however, was not the only emerging political power in the eighteenth century to shape an architecture that incorporated vegetal imaginaries. Prior to the construction of Gangamohan Kunj in Vrindavan, the Bharatpur rulers had already utilized Shah Jahan’s architecture in their mid-­eighteenth-­century garden palace in Dig, a site that has now become part of the annual forty-­day Braj circumambulation tour (bari yatra, literally, “big journey”) organized by the Pushtimarg community (figure 3.12).38 Although construction in Dig had begun with Badan Singh in the 1720s, it was during Suraj Mal and Ganga Rani’s reign that new pavilions and gardens were laid out at the site. Much like the royal palace in Jaipur, Suraj Bhawan in Dig, named after the patron Suraj Mal, was set in a Timurid quadripartite paradise garden (charbagh) with four axial water courses, a garden typology introduced in South Asia by the Mughals (figure 3.13). Faced in white marble with cusped arches, baluster columns, and the distinctive Mughal curvilinear bangla, the single-­story sandstone structure clearly referenced Shah Jahan’s mid-­seventeenth-­century architecture. The dado adorned with jasper, agate, lapis lazuli, and cornelian flowering plants in pietra dura further accentuated this imperial connection (figure 3.14). The naturalistic irises, poppies, and lilies placed at discreet intervals against a plain, white-­marble background followed a decorative schema that had been developed in the 1630s under Shah Jahan 110  chap ter three

3.12. (Above) Suraj Bhawan, Dig Palace, Dig, ca. 1750. 3.13. (Left) Plan of Dig Palace, Dig, ca. 1750. Based on plan in Henry H. Cole, Illustrations of Buildings near Muttra, No. 2–69.

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3.14. (Above) Dado, Suraj Bhawan, Dig Palace, Dig, ca. 1750. 3.15. (Right) Flowering plants in pietra dura. Hall of Private Audience (Diwan-i Khass), Shahjahanabad Palace, Delhi, ca. 1638–48.

and was predominantly used in Taj Mahal in Agra and Shahjahanabad Palace (figure 3.15).39 However, Suraj Mal’s mid-­eighteenth-­century garden palace was not a facile replication of Shah Jahan’s architecture, even though motifs such as the bangla baldachin with acanthus-­decorated baluster columns and a curvilinear molding terminating in leaf buds were carefully cited (figure 3.16). For instance, the prominent double eaves or cornices, a functional innovation that appears in South Asia for the first time in Dig, perhaps served the specific purpose 112  chap ter three

3.16. Detail of façade, Suraj Bhawan, Dig Palace, Dig, ca. 1750.

of maneuvering rainfall as a visual effect. While single projecting eaves (chajja) supported on carved corbel brackets were routinely used across the Indo-­ Islamic world to prevent direct sunlight from striking buildings, the top eave of Suraj Bhawan with its serpentine brackets becomes an extension of the flat roof, while the lower sloping overhang extends some distance beyond the upper eave. In effect, the sloping lower eave utilizes the force of natural rainfall to create a screen of water during the monsoons. Adequate monsoon was fundamental for the survival of the primarily agricultural Jat community to which Suraj Mal belonged. Consequently, rain became an aesthetic trope woven into the very fabric of the structure. In time, the construction of massive water tanks, the use of mechanical devices that mimicked the sound of falling rain, and the practice of naming pavilions after fore s t   113

the monsoon season further reiterated the role of water in the design of the garden palace in Dig. The use of a fine-­grained beige sandstone, extracted from the quarries of Bansi Paharpur controlled by the rulers of Bharatpur, also marked a drastic departure from earlier red-­sandstone construction that had become representative of Braj’s monumental architecture from the sixteenth century onward. All of these architectural innovations were employed by the rulers of Bharatpur in the many palaces and temples they erected across the kingdom. Concurrent to Dig, the 1750s Gangamohan Kunj in Vrindavan that was patronized by Suraj Mal’s wife, Ganga Rani, was also a flat-­roofed single-­storied structure with double eaves constructed of beige sandstone. This was the first temple in Braj to be built with beige sandstone that had been extracted from the quarries controlled by the rulers of Bharatpur. It was certainly not a coincidence that the rulers of Bharatpur espoused the use of stone that had been quarried from their kingdom rather than the red sandstone that had, by then, become strongly associated with a two-­hundred-­year architectural tradition in Braj. Thus, the use of a particular stone was not merely a matter of convenience but a carefully orchestrated statement on the part of patrons to link the material of architecture with the material that constituted land. Sharply departing from sixteenth-­century architectural paradigms that had been popularized with the construction of structures such as Govind Dev, the new mid-­eighteenth-­ century beige-­sandstone temples in Braj were characterized by the use of decorative motifs such as baluster columns, cusped arches, bangla baldachins, vegetal carvings, lattice screens (jali), and double eaves. Art historians have proposed that the antecedent of this new, flat-­roofed, hypostyle temple lay in pre-­Islamic domestic architecture.40 At the same time, the absence of a superstructure is explained in both sectarian literature and scholarship through the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb’s alleged defacement of Govind Dev in Vrindavan.41 Suggesting that the absence of a monumental superstructure in eighteenth-­century temples was a deliberate attempt on the part of patrons to avoid conspicuous visibility in a period that purportedly witnessed rising Mughal iconoclasm, the art historian Ravinder Nath, for instance, writes, “Sacred architecture in India had hitherto been guided by traditional theory for the purpose of creating harmonious beauty and auspiciousness. In this adverse time, however, the protection of the deities called for greater flexibility, even if it meant surrendering some ancient forms of construction.”42 Mughal records, however, do not corroborate this line of reasoning.43 Setting aside such puerile assertions, it is easy to see the slightly elevated flat-­roofed Gangamohan Kunj in Vrindavan as emblematic of a new citational vocabulary that emerged in the eighteenth century across regional courts with the cultural vacuum that ensued with Mughal political decline. Yet unlike Suraj Mal’s garden palace in Dig or Govind Dev Temple in Jaipur, Gangamohan Kunj was not set in a Mughal-­style quadripartite paradise 114  chap ter three

garden (charbagh). The symmetrically designed charbagh mobilized across courts in north India by the seventeenth century was a visual and symbolic manifestation of the sovereign’s capacity to control and order the natural environment.44 With its explicit political symbolism, the Timurid charbagh had been introduced in north India by the Mughal emperor Babur through the construction of a number of gardens, such as Lotus Garden (Bagh-­i Nilufar; 1527–29) in Dholpur, adjacent to Dig. Unlike the planned Mughal-­style garden that provided a clear vision of mapped space, the natural environment ordered into a complex system of well-­arranged water channels and flower beds, most eighteenth-­century temples in Braj had a dense overgrown kunja leading to the sanctum. But it is of equal significance that the temple was not designated as a mandir, the idiomatic word for a temple, or the Sanskrit devalaya, the residence of the gods, but as a kunja, a bower. Gangamohan Kunj was the bower of Gangamohan, a conjunction of Ganga Rani, the patron of the temple, and Mohan, a popular epithet of Krishna. In relation to built form, Shah Jahan’s distinctive bangla baldachin was thus transformed into a marquee of stone leaves that simulated floral canopies seen in contemporaneous paintings depicting Krishna and Radha (see figure 3.25).45 A dense constellation of religious practices and beliefs structured this transformation. While one could place Gangmohan Kunj within the political and aesthetic networks of eighteenth-­century north India that emerged from the interstices of Mughal royal metaphors, regional courtly identities, and Vaishnava poetic imaginaries of lush bowers, an eco art history calls for a placement of these assemblages within both transformations in the natural environment and the space of architecture. Consequently, we might read the floriated surface of Gangmohan Kunj in relation to the deforestation that was occurring in Braj in this period. Architecture, then, serves not only as a structural metaphor but also as an episteme that connects lived practices with tectonic form. The flat-­roofed Gangamohan Kunj, with its extravagant vegetal decoration, also inaugurated a new idiom of temple architecture that continued well into the nineteenth century, reaffirming the efficacy of this new eighteenth-­century aesthetics in a larger north Indian world (see figure 4.3). With the construction of Gangamohan Kunj, we see the materialization of a vegetal aesthetics that, at its core, engaged with the personhood of sentient plant life. Krishna himself praises the trees of Braj as ethical beings in a verse in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa: “The trees bestow benefit in the form of young shoots, coal, ashes, sap, fragrance, wood, bark, roots, shade, fruits, flowers and leaves. Activities in the form of words, knowledge, wealth, and life, which are always conducive to the welfare of living beings in the world, [indicate] a successful birth among living beings.”46 Much like conceptualizations of the earth as divine geobody—the hill as a living being who bled if wounded—early modern Vaishnava texts unequivocally declare that plants and trees in Braj are sentient subjects. In scriptural sources, trees are consequently often imagined fore s t   115

as embodied forms of Krishna.47 The origin of this conception of other-­than-­ human personhood lay in texts such as the ca. sixth-­century Tales of Skanda (Skanda Purāṇa; Skanda is the son of the god Shiva), where Vishnu was perceived as “the tree itself.”48 But it is in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, a foundational text for the development of the liturgy of Krishna worship in Braj, that we observe a unique relationship between plant and human life. On one occasion, the Bhāgavata Purāṇa recounts, the cowherd women of Braj were frantically seeking Krishna in the forests of Vrindavan. On not being able to find their beloved Krishna, the women ask the trees and the vines if they had seen the divine lord: “Singing loudly in unison only about him, they searched from grove to grove, like mad women. They asked the trees about the supreme being who, like space, is inside and outside living creatures.”49 Vividly illustrated in the ca. 1520–40 Palam Bhāgavata Purāṇa, a manuscript we encountered earlier, this narrative of interspecies interaction was exceptional, possibly unprecedented, in South Asian religious and literary cultures.50 Divided into two horizontal registers, the devotees in the Palam folio search for Krishna on a moonlit night, anxiously asking the trees and flowering creepers in the forests of Vrindavan where their lord is (figure 3.17). The use of specific hand gestures (mudra) signifying communication underscores a contingent social world inhabited by both humans and plants. That trees—even specific ones—were considered significant within the ecocultural topos of Braj is evident from the jurisdictional disputes over individual trees. On April 29, 1654, a complaint was brought before the Mughal commandant of Mathura by the Gaudiya community that a certain Damodar Das had forcibly taken control of two trees under which Chaitanya had allegedly sat. The litigation was finally settled when the arbitrator apportioned one tree, along with the adjacent land, to each of the plaintiffs.51 The proceedings of the 1654 litigation provide a glimpse into the simultaneously symbolic and economic importance of even a single tree in Braj. While at face value, the lawsuit was a contention over property ownership, the claim was nonetheless made in the name of an affective configuration that envisioned trees as sentient beings. Describing Chaitanya’s arrival in Vrindavan, Krishnadasa Kaviraja thus writes: When they saw Prabhu [Chaitanya], the trees and creepers of Vṛndāvana bore their own gooseflesh in the form of shoots, and they rained tears of honey. Branches laden with fruits and flowers bent at the feet of Prabhu, as when a friend meets a friend he brings a gift. . . . Seeing the love of all of these, Prabhu was overcome with bhāva [devotional state of mind], and he played with them all, controlled by them. Prabhu embraced each tree and creeper, and in his thoughts he made offerings of the flowers and the rest to Kṛṣṇa.52 If the natural environment of Braj was associated with particular episodes from Krishna’s life on earth, devotees consequently aspired to evoke and 116  chap ter three

3.17. The Gopis seek Krishna in the forest. Palam Bha¯gavata Pura¯n.a, ca. 1520–40. Ink and watercolor on paper, 17.78 × 23.5 cm. Repository: Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Katherine Kittredge McMillan Memorial Fund, 95.4.1. Photo courtesy Minneapolis Institute of Art.

relish Krishna’s relationship with rivers, rocks, and trees through embodied enactment. In time, this notion of an embodied experience of the environment led to the rise of a popular theater known as the raas lila in which troupes performed plays to commemorate Krishna’s childhood escapades in the region.53 But the underlying principle of this performative practice emerged from a dialogic relationship with the earth. Thus, if the trees of Vrindavan embraced Chaitanya (the reincarnation of Krishna, according to the Gaudiyas) as a friend, devotees could recall and dwell upon this human-­plant intimacy by developing an analogous relationship with these trees. In the eighteenth century, this corporeal aesthetics of interspecies intimacy accrued tactile and sensorial immediacy through architectural form, particularly in a period that witnessed substantial deforestation in Braj as a result of increasing pressure on the habitat. By traversing the carefully planted bowers in the courtyards of eighteenth-­century temples such as Gangamohan Kunj, a devotee could bodily experience Radha’s journey to meet her beloved Krishna. fore s t   117

Crucially for us, the temple’s courtyard with a bower of thickly-­planted trees and vines facing the sanctum was introduced in the mid-­eighteenth century. This led to a shift in the very experience of moving through sacred space. The cavernous mandapa (central hall) of sixteenth-­century temples such as Govind Dev in Braj offered a space for communal worship.54 By the time Gangmohan Kunj was built, this earlier practice of a collective experience of seeing and worshiping seems to have been replaced with a more intimate experience of encountering Krishna. The introduction of a walled garden courtyard, densely overgrown with creepers and vines, offered that space of withdrawal from the everyday agropastoral domain of eighteenth-­century Braj. If we then return to the mid-­eighteenth-­century Gangmohan Kunj, this time as a spectral contact-­ zone between plants and humans, we might read the temple’s spatial ordering as engendering a specific interspecies relationship. Sweet-­smelling jasmine flowers were vital to the embodied aesthetics of this interspecies relationship. Praised by the Mughal emperors as one of most aromatic flowers in South Asia and introduced in Europe in the sixteenth century for perfume making, the jasmine, an evergreen vine indigenous to South and Southeast Asia, was the most efficacious flower associated with the liturgy of Krishna worship in Braj.55 Krishna’s teeth are glistening jasmine flowers;56 blooming jasmines act as a stimulus to turn the lord’s “thoughts toward enjoying love”;57 and the white jasmine (Jasminum grandiflorum), resplendent like the moon, often serves as a substitute for Krishna.58 In architecture, the swirling vines and floriated moldings on the surfaces of Gangamohan Kunj undoubtedly emphasized the function of jasmines in liturgy. Unlike lattice screens with geometric design typically used in Mughal architecture, the screens surrounding the sanctum were profusely decorated with jasmine vines. The careful attention to the carving of the flower’s characteristic cylindrical corolla tube and multi-­cleft calyx hints at a botanical similitude that was unparalleled in temple architecture in South Asia before this time. Given the unambiguous function of the flower in stimulating desire for Krishna, the sanctum was literally swathed with realistic jasmines in stone. Yet if the temple façade was constructed to simulate a verdant bower, how was the actual bower in the temple’s courtyard conceived in a period that saw forests disappearing rapidly due to urban growth? A coterminous engagement with both environmental and architectural systems is crucial for excavating the biophilic spatiality of eighteenth-­century temples in Braj. The kunjas in Vaishnava poetry were undoubtedly enchanted spaces, a transcendental realm where Radha and Krishna joined each other in ecstatic love. Neither natural nor unnatural, the bower, according to poetry composed in Braj, had the characteristics of both a shrine and a throne-­room.59 Even though we find thick architectonic descriptions of temple bowers in liturgical texts and administrative accounts, only a few such bowers exist in Vrindavan today.60 118  chap ter three

3.18. Cooch Behar Kunj, Vrindavan, 1795.

One such surviving bower, albeit replanted over time, can still be seen in the courtyard of a 1795 flat-­roofed temple in Vrindavan patronized by the rulers of Cooch Behar from eastern India (figure 3.18).61 Entering Cooch Behar Kunj through a large gateway that leads to the central courtyard, one immediately encounters a mass of creepers, signaling toward the secretive bowers of Vaishnava poetry. As my photograph from 2012 makes evident, the sanctum is still not visible from the enclosure. Like Radha, the devotee would thus have to make her or his way through a dense mass of sweet-­smelling jasmine vines, brushing aside unruly stems or bending low in places where the creepers have grown too close to the ground. It is only after this passage, at once physical, metaphorical, and symbolic, that the devotee would finally see Krishna framed by a triple-­arched colonnade that bears a striking resemblance to the façade of Gangamohan Kunj. Exceeding both poetic and painterly allegories, groves in the courtyards of eighteenth-­century temples then allowed for the articulation of an embodied liturgical practice that transformed the act of encountering the divine into a somatic relational engagement with animated plant life.

Vegetal Habitats The idea of the bower, of course, did not emerge in eighteenth-­century Braj. One finds references to a wide range of gardens in late fourth-­and fifth-­century fore s t   119

texts.62 We also find allusions to bowers, described in treatises as a group of trees forming an enclosure or vines planted around a pavilion (mandapa), that offer shelter from harsh climate.63 Such enclosed bowers or pleasure gardens were seen as concealed spaces of enchantment where lovers often met for romantic trysts. By the sixth century, the garden had become intrinsic to imaginaries of the urbane city.64 Recent archaeobotanical excavations in sites such as Sigiriya in Sri Lanka and Sanchi in central India have also revealed how gardens in medieval South Asia were materialized through a system of aestheticizing land with the construction of artificial water channels and enclosed groves that offered an appearance of pristine nature.65 The carefully designed bowers in Braj, however, were part of a distinctly different system of imagining and seeing the natural environment. The eighteenth-­ century bowers of Braj developed alongside a rich biophilic literary culture in a period that witnessed massive deforestation that fundamentally transformed the natural topography of the region. It is tempting, then, to read the kunjas of Braj as an invented space that embodied an idea of idyllic, unspoiled nature in the context of a rapidly changing agropastoral sphere. Indeed, the idea of unspoiled nature, as it emerged in eighteenth-­century British literature, art, and horticulture with the advent of a new bourgeois consciousness and a parallel escalation in urbanization, was, according to the literary theorist Raymond Williams, an “imposing mystification” that shaped nature as a chimeric arcadia.66 In relation to eighteenth-­century England’s socio-economic and cultural configurations, nature could consequently function only as an “ideology associated with the rise of modern science and the emergence of capitalist economies in Western Europe.”67 But contemporaneous Braj was a world away from the highly developed agrarian capitalism of England. Consequently, eighteenth-­century visual culture from the pilgrimage center does allow us to envisage the shaping of a geoaesthetics at the intersection of creative practices, biophilic liturgy, and ecocatastrophes wrought by deforestation and urbanization. This engagement is perhaps most clearly discernable in paintings by Nihalchand, the artist from the kingdom of Kishangarh, with whom we began this chapter. Belonging to a family of artists who had migrated from Delhi to Kishangarh in 1694, Nihalchand is today best known for his portraits of Radha and Krishna painted in close collaboration with his patron, the poet-­ruler Savant Singh. Indeed, many of the artist’s works from the 1730s illustrate verses of Vaishnava devotion penned by Savant Singh that are still sung in temples in Braj.68 Nihalchand’s lyrical paintings from this period also heralded a distinctive new visual language in South Asian painterly cultures that was marked by elongated forms, stylized faces, and an idyllic landscape with dense foliage. The ca. 1745 painting of a kunja in Vrindavan is exemplary of this new turn in eighteenth-­century painting cultures. Locating corporeal devotionality in the dense bowers of Braj,

120  chap ter three

3.19. Nihalchand (attr.), Flirtation on the Riverbank, Kishangarh, ca. 1750. Opaque water­ color on paper, 19.1 × 28.6 cm. Repository: The Walters Art Museum, Gift of John and Berthe Ford, 2002, W.860. Photo courtesy Walters Art Museum.

the painting emphasizes the sexual intimacy between Radha and Krishna as a metaphor for the relationship between the devotee and the divine. However, it is a ca. 1750 painting of Krishna and Radha by the river Yamuna that opens up the devotional imaginaries of Braj to an expansive horizon (figure 3.19). In the foreground, we see Krishna helping Radha carry water from the river while other women bathe and wash clothes. Carefully combining his characteristic style of elongated eyes and sharp features with the Mughal technique of three-­quarter faces, Nihalchand places the figures in an expansive landscape in a way that offers an image of the infinitude of nature. Consequently, we see Radha and Krishna appear, albeit in miniature form, multiple times in the receding background while the horizon is dominated by urban settlements, towering forts, and ships engaged in riverine trade. Much has been written about this remarkable painting. While there is some debate about whether the painting can be attributed to Nihalchand on the

fore s t   121

basis of artistic style, art historians have proposed that the use of perspective and the depiction of ships suggest European influence.69 One can certainly read a particular engagement with European regimes of visualization in the use of perspective. By the mid-­eighteenth century, Kishangarh court artists were experimenting with perspective learned from European engravings circulating in the subcontinent.70 At the same time, the painting also functions as an archive of the various imaginaries of land that were in place in mid-­ eighteenth-­century Braj. Savant Singh, we know, settled in Vrindavan in 1751, after abdicating from the Kishangarh throne in 1748.71 While there is little archival evidence that points to Nihalchand accompanying his patron during Savant Singh’s numerous pilgrimages to the region, it seems that the artist visited Savant Singh a number of times after the ruler established residence in Vrindavan in 1751.72 The painting, completed around the time Savant Singh settled in Vrindavan, reflects the artist’s intimate knowledge of the urban topography of Braj. In the painting, we see ghats with steps leading to the Yamuna and a cityscape dominated by the octagonal superstructures of sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­ century temples. In the horizon, a prominent tower is conceivably intended as a representation of the 1570 Sati Burj in Mathura. What is striking, however, is the many varieties of gardens depicted. Using his characteristic thick layering of paint, Nihalchand creates dense uninhabited bowers, fragrant with flowering trees, in the middle ground where Krishna and Radha roam. We also see clusters of trees growing in the urban zones by the river Yamuna, while swift brushstrokes are employed by the artist to depict the shrubs in the meadow in the foreground. Simultaneously, we see a lush garden enclosed with thick walls and ramparts adjacent to the river. It is important to note that there are no temples or domestic structures in the rectangular enclosure, indicating that the space did indeed function solely as a garden. Enclosed gardens were not uncommon in eighteenth-­century South Asia. A number of gardens were built by both the Mughal emperors and the north Indian elite in cities such as nearby Agra and Delhi. Most of these gardens were built with a quadripartite paradise plan introduced by the Mughals that was marked by an axial division of space into geometric quadrants (figure 3.20). In most instances, such gardens were also decorated with Shah Jahan’s distinctive pavilions with their curvilinear baldachins and baluster columns, formal rows of flower beds, and water features such as canals and fountains. A ca. 1735 painting of the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah (1702–48) in an enclosed garden attributed to Nidha Mal (fl. 1735–75), an artist employed in the royal atelier, provides us with a glimpse of how these urban gardens—now littered with plastic and the city’s waste—would have been used. The 1735 painting depicts the sovereign on horseback accompanied by courtiers surveying the imperial garden (figure 3.21). Flowering plants and trees are carefully placed in quadrangular plots while water flows from the fountains in the center of the garden, 122  chap ter three

3.20. Jharna Garden, Mehrauli, Delhi, 1700, with later renovations.

3.21. Nidha Mal (attr.), Muhammad Shah in a Garden, ca. 1735. Ink, light colors, and gold on paper, 47 × 73.5 Repository: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Francis Bartlett Donation of 1912 and Museum purchase with funds donated by contribution, 14.686. Photograph © 2019 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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3.22. Gateway and enclosing masonry wall, Seva Kunj, Vrindavan, ca. 1750, renovated in 1972.

offering a vision of nature controlled and ordered. The enclosed rectangular garden in Nihalchand’s painting, however, demonstrated a spatial ordering entirely different from the Mughal quadripartite paradise garden. There were no pathways to direct the movement of bodies through the garden. Neither were Mughal-­style pavilions and opulent decorative fountains introduced to embellish the space. Rather, the garden was a mass of trees and fecund vines that created an appearance of deep wilderness within a space demarcated by an enclosure. Along with kunjas in temple courtyards, a few detached gardens still survive in Braj. Seva Kunj, literally “the bower where one serves (seva) the divine,” in the heart of urban Vrindavan is one such example. We find the earliest reference to Seva Kunj in 1534, when an icon of Krishna as Radhavallabh was installed at the site.73 By the eighteenth century, a high masonry wall with elaborate gateways was built to enclose the kunja, traces of which still remain (figure 3.22). Local narratives declare that Krishna and Radha spend their nights in Seva Kunj, and even today the gates of the grove are accordingly ritually locked each evening to prevent devotees from disturbing the divine 124  chap ter three

3.23. Bowers in Seva Kunj, Vrindavan, with recent bamboo scaffolding.

couple during their nocturnal tryst. Visiting Seva Kunj in October 1759 during a pilgrimage to Braj, Nana Fadnavis (1742–1800), an influential statesman from western India, observed that the lush overgrowth of trees in the grove offered a pleasant contrast to the natural vegetation of the region. The trees, Fadnavis noted, “are rather low in stature but they are very thickly studded with branches and leaves, affording a permanent shade. The grove abounds in trees of all kinds: but those, whose nature is to have thorns in other places, here have none. I was much delighted in these groves, and could fancy them still the retired abode of some divinity.”74 Fadnavis’ account from 1759 makes evident that the grove as it appears now had already been established by the mid-­eighteenth century. Even today the trees at the site—predominantly jasmines and other plants associated with Krishna worship—are fastidiously pruned so that they remain low in stature (figure 3.23). In effect, the visitor is drawn into a tactile relationship with plants that simulate Radha’s journey through the dense groves of Vaishnava poetry. At the same time, the construction of a masonry wall to enclose this enchanted space implies that this practice of sylvan theophany emerged from a crisis in mythopoeia that had to reconcile with a looming ecological predicament. Thus, fore s t   125

rather than echoing the actual natural vegetation of the region, the design of Seva Kunj seems to have been based on descriptions of the bower in Vaishnava poetry, a fact that even Nana Fadnavis noted during his visit to the grove. Of course, one has to remember that forest conservation, in our contemporary sense of the word, would develop in South Asia only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with the British government initiating large-­scale conservation efforts based on Alexander von Humboldt’s environmental philosophy that connected deforestation to increasing aridity and temperature change.75 Nonetheless, it is equally important to note that even while the professionalization of forest management occurred under British rule, there were a number of precolonial instances of the preservation and protection of forests and sacred groves. Given the paucity of archival records from the early modern period, scholarship has mostly focused on colonial forest conservation in South Asia. However, even with our limited insight into both the philosophy and praxis of seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century forest management, we know, for instance, that the rulers of Sind (now Sindh), in contemporary Pakistan, were responsible for the reforestation of over a million acres of the Indus flood plain between 1690 and 1830.76 Forest reserves, primarily meant for hunting, were also built in Sind, some of which had walls around them to keep out intruders. Closer to Braj, a boundary wall was built around the Mughal ten-­acre hunting park in Jaunti near the royal capital of Shahjahanabad during the reign of Aurangzeb.77 Thus, the construction of an enclosing wall around Seva Kunj in Vrindavan was not out of place. The principal difference was that unlike seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century enclosed forest reserves where rulers would hunt animals, Seva Kunj and other similar sacred bowers in Braj functioned as sequestered but immersive bioenvironments where the devotee could viscerally feel Radha’s encounter with the sentient plants of a poetic Braj. Nihalchand, too, depicts such a sequestered sacred bower in his ca. 1750 painting. Markedly different from other contemporaneous biohabitats, Seva Kunj was not intended to replicate an actual forest. Rather, it was a metonymic space where the potencies of sacredness and sentient plants cohabited, shaping a specific kinesthetic experience formed through the sensory registers of sight, tactility, movement, and proximity. Playing with scale and space, the technologies of garden design employed here was thus distinctly different from contemporaneous Mughal gardens or hunting reserves. The effect, put simply, was to emphasize the sensuousness of an interspecies encounter while immersing oneself among sentient plants. Immersion, in this specific context, was a somatic practice that found its philosophical and experiential structures in the Vaishnava philosophy of play, or lila. Although the concept of lila had been articulated in the early centuries of the Common Era as a spontaneous expression of divine creative power, it was with Vaishnavism in early modern Braj that a specific visual and haptic procedure 126  chap ter three

through which this play could be savored was established. In Braj, theologians asserted, a devotee could corporeally experience Krishna’s presence through a reenactment that suspended time but was situated in space. That is, by traversing through Seva Kunj, a devotee could participate and immerse himself or herself in the cosmic play between Radha and Krishna that occurred in that very space, making the grove the ground for an extraordinary intersubjective experience. The towering wall, a powerful apparatus of containment, actively separated this idealized world of ludic play from both other forms of play and the spaces of the everyday.78 At a time when forests in the region were rapidly disappearing, Seva Kunj was being materialized as a cosmological grove that performatively entangled philosophical, symbolic, and aesthetic perceptions of an imagined natural environment. The devotee’s experience of traversing through the garden was, however, based on an ingenious transmediatic architectural system. By carefully pruning the trees in the garden to resemble diminutive arched colonnades, the thickly growing vines were given a tectonic shape that emulated the pavilions of contemporaneous flat-­roofed temples such as Gangamohan Kunj. In Gangamohan Kunj, the devotee came upon the temple only after crossing a bower or kunja, the sweet-­smelling vines and jasmine flowers of which found a visual corollary in the carved stone surfaces of the structure. While the curvilinear arches of the temple resembled the carefully pruned rounded clusters of vines in the kunja, the kunja, in turn, reflected the architectonic form of the temple. In effect, this vegetal tectonic led to a new typology of garden spaces that connected the botanical to the architectural. By the late eighteenth century, this new garden typology had been adopted in Vaishnava centers across South Asia. In 1770, at the same time that Kavi Atmaram, the Jaipur court poet, was describing the city in western India as a beautiful kunja where Krishna roamed “ever-­blissful,” a hidden, or gupta, Vrindavan was created in the kingdom of Vishnupur in eastern India through a systematic renaming and consecration of the topography of the region. The eighteenth-­century construction of temples, artificial lakes, and gardens with plants specific to Vaishnava liturgy allowed for the mapping of the “original” Vrindavan onto this new pilgrimage town in eastern India. Writing on the making of this “new” Vrindavan, the art historian Pika Ghosh notes that this strategy linked and legitimated both sites.79 It was the notion of Vrindavan as a manifest form of the nonmanifest, a space that was simultaneously physical and metaphysical, that provided the theological framework for the multiple recreations of Vrindavan. If Vrindavan was a palpable reflection of the nonmanifest world where Krishna plays eternally, it was also possible to establish and reestablish the site over and again. Thus, like Gangamohan Kunj, a thick bower was planted in the rectangular courtyard of the late eighteenth-­century Chandramanohar Temple in Jaipur’s Tripolia bazaar, a thriving marketplace minutes away from the royal palace fore s t   127

3.24. Chandramanohar Temple, Jaipur, ca. 1790.

and Govind Dev Temple in the city (figure 3.24).80 Built by the family of priests that maintain Govind Dev in Jaipur, the spatial and architectural configuration of Chandramanohar Temple was characteristic of eighteenth-­century Vaishnava architecture. However, it is in comparison to contemporaneous paintings from Jaipur itself that we can fully comprehend the ways in which this new vegetal aesthetics was mobilized across the subcontinent in both architecture and painting. Take, for instance, an early nineteenth-­century manuscript from Jaipur illustrating the Vaishnava poet Shribhatta’s sixteenth-­century verses recounting Krishna and Radha’s tender affection. In a folio from the manuscript, we see the divine couple gazing into each other’s eyes (figure 3.25). It is of some significance that the enamored lovers are enfolded by a canopy of blooming jasmine creepers. Here, the painted bower functions as a frame for the devotee to focus on Krishna and Radha in their amorous act, reiterating the function of the arbor as an architectural device that makes possible concentration on a single point.81 Both the early nineteenth-­century painting and the garden in Chandramanohar Temple, then, present a remarkable similarity in their 128  chap ter three

3.25. Illustration to poems by Shribhatta, ca. 1800, Pigment on paper, 20 × 28.9 cm. Repository: The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, W.925. Photo courtesy Walters Art Museum.

engagement with vegetal life. In both instances, the bower takes on an architectonic quality replicating the arched colonnades of contemporaneous temple architecture. In both instances, the bower also functions as a vegetal frame to ritually see Krishna and Radha enthroned in the sanctum. Shaped by a creative interplay of gardening, poetry, painting, and architecture and forming a liminal threshold that interconnects the devotee and the divine, the bower thus offered a transformative aesthetics based on sensuous interactions between plants and humans.

Bowers in the Era of Colonial Botany Although Hendrik Adriaan van Reede tot Drakenstein, the Dutch commander of Malabar, had published his Hortus Indicus Malabaricus, a twelve-­volume treatise on plants in south India, as early as 1678, it was the formation of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1784 that inaugurated the study of the natural history of South Asia in a systemic manner.82 Colonial scientists established botanical gardens such as the Royal Botanic Garden in Calcutta fore s t   129

(1787) and published comprehensive studies on plants.83 The late eighteenth century also saw translations of earlier Mughal compendiums on medicinal plants under the aegis of the East India Company. The Vocabulary of Drugs (Alfāz ul-­Adwiyah; 1628–29), written by Shah Jahan’s physician Nur al-­Din Muhammad Shirazi, for instance, was published in Calcutta in 1793 in English, Persian, Arabic, and Hindavi.84 Thus, the development of a vegetal aesthetics in mid-­to late eighteenth-­century Braj occurred at a time when considerable advancements in botany and modern plant sciences were being made in colonial cities as part of a larger imperial web that linked science, trade, and governance. By the last decade of the eighteenth century, colonial authorities had also introduced regulations that protected extant forests to combat droughts induced by El Niño Southern Oscillation anomalies.85 In 1791, a decree was passed to protect the King’s Hill forest on the island of St. Vincent in the Caribbean to thwart rainfall alterations. The law was also put into force in the British colonies of St. Helena and India. It was the global impact of the 1791 El Niño Southern Oscillation that led to a keen interest in forest protection in colonies worldwide in the hope of preventing decline in rainfall and thus averting agrarian crises.86 In South Asia, the famine following the 1791 oscillation devastated large parts of the subcontinent. The political theorist Edmund Burke, too, referred to the high mortality rate that ensued with the droughts of 1791 in his critique of the East India Company’s economic policies.87 The El Niño climate anomalies between 1789 and 1793 also led colonial botanists such as William Roxburgh (1751–1815) to study longue durée histories of droughts and climate change in the subcontinent. Based on local oral narratives, the Scottish botanist noted that droughts due to lack of rainfall had likewise occurred between 1685 and 1687.88 It is only now, after decades of research by paleobotanists and climatologists, that we can correlate Roxburgh’s observations on historical droughts with corresponding El Niño Southern Oscillation anomalies. It is only now that we can turn to this period and designate it as the Little Ice Age. Yet what is noteworthy about eighteenth-­century imaginaries of bowers and gardens in Braj is the categorical disregard of this incipient scientificism. It is as if modern science had not disturbed the enchanted worlds of Krishna worship in Braj. While ecologists and environmental historians such as Madhav Gadgil and V. D. Vartak see similar sacred groves in South Asia as solitary remnants of a precolonial forest “in near-­virgin condition,” it is important to recall that the eighteenth-­century groves in Braj were not representative of the region’s vegetation.89 For they were simulated gardens. Rather than idealizing such sacerdotal biohabitats as static and unchanging, the anthropologist Ann G. Gold has called for a post-­romantic approach to the study of sacred groves, one that is careful not to fetishize the non-­modern but that takes the resilience of religious conceptions of flora and fauna seriously.90 130  chap ter three

Given that eighteenth-­century painterly, architectural, and arboricultural impulses in Braj materialized in response to the loss of natural vegetation due to increasing pressure on the land, one indeed must be cautious to not envision Braj’s devotional communities as a timeless pre-­industrial society allegedly living harmoniously in idealized nature. Neither were embodied liturgical practices in Braj a node of a primitive ecological insight that would subsequently be uprooted by the technological modernity of the colonial state. The kunjas of Braj, then, offer a striking case study to explore the role of eighteenth-­ century art, architecture, horticulture, and poetry in shaping a very different idea of nature at the cusp of colonial modernity. Rather than the colonial picturesque, which also emerged in the eighteenth century as an imperialist spectatorial regime of seeing and ordering the natural world, a phenomenologically grounded account of the kunja as an interspecies habitus holds the promise of a geoaesthetics that foregrounds the relationship between humans and nonhumans.91 In such an account, it is not the picturesque, an abstracted act of disembodied looking, but the act of dwelling or being in the oikos as habitus that offers a framework to envisage a more capacious relationship between species. While the project of writing the history of colonial attempts to reshape the natural environment is unquestionably an important task, an engagement with phyto-­ worlds solely through a modernist paradigm that focuses on human mediations in ordering, managing, and mastering the ecologies of plants, flowers, fruits, roots, and seeds runs the risk of marginalizing practices at the edges of statist environmentalisms. Rather than the humdrum of statist discourse, the small voices of pilgrims, poets, artists, and priests in Braj demonstrate that the objectification of nature through institutionalized scientificism was not the only way to see the environment in the era of colonial botany. The kunja in Braj was not the picturesque geoterrain that could be mapped, ordered, and possessed. Rather, it was an inclusive habitus of inventive play where sentient plants and humans could share a contingent correlation of equivalence.

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four | ether What is the origin of this world? Ether [akasa], he replied. For all these beings take their rise from the ether, and return into the ether. Ether is older than these, ether is their rest.—Cha¯ndogyopanis¸ad (Hidden Teachings of the Singers [of the Sa¯ma Veda])

In 1866, the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) used the term oecologie to describe the relationship of organisms with the surrounding world, both organic and inorganic, to which one could, in a broad sense, reckon “all conditions of existence” (existenzbedingungen).1 With its roots in the Greek oikos, Haeckel’s oecologie, a term that led to the development of a subfield of botany and geography in the late nineteenth century, referred both to the study of the system of interactions in the environment but also to the system itself. Only two years later, in 1868, Shah Kundanlal (1825–73), a Vaishnava merchant from the city of Lucknow, built a temple in Vrindavan to his beloved Krishna (figure 4.1). At first glance, the development of the concept of oecologie—ecology—in Germany and the construction of a temple to Krishna in distant north India may not appear to have much in common. But as we will see, both the concept of ecology and the philosophical arrangements that structured the construction of Shahji Temple by the Yamuna in Vrindavan emerged, albeit discreetly, from a comprehension of the connectedness that constitutes the oikos in which we dwell.2 At the very onset, it is necessary to annotate the two conceptions of the oikos that confronted each other in the colony. The first emerged from modern European scientific theorizations on ecology. During his travels in India and Sri Lanka, Haeckel, for instance, carefully documented the biological life of the region, even setting up a temporary laboratory where he collected zoological specimens.3 Influenced by the writings of Haeckel and Alexander von 133

4.1. Shahji Temple, Vrindavan, 1868.

Humboldt, among others, a generation of colonial administrators subsequently archived and meticulously cataloged South Asia’s flora, fauna, and mineral reserves. The history of the production of empirical scientific knowledge about the colony’s natural resources is by now well known.4 The other system of imagining the oikos, one that forms the core of our deliberations, arose out of a conception of the physical element of akasa—ether—one of the five elements in Vaishnava philosophy, as primal matter linking organic and inorganic forms and life across space. Krishnadasa Kaviraja’s seventeenth-­century biography of Chaitanya was a likely antecedent for this philosophical conception in Vaishnava imaginaries. As Kaviraja wrote, “It is as if in succeeding elements the qualities of sky [akasa] and the rest were increased gradually culminating all five [elements] in the earth.”5 Put differently, Kaviraja offered a vision of the earth as a cumulative result of a progression that commenced with the element of akasa. Such philosophical speculations regarding the composition and structure of the ecosphere were in circulation in the ecumenical worlds of nineteenth-­century Braj and might have offered Vaishnava patrons such as Kundanlal a different hermeneutic of the natural environment that was aligned differently from the scientificism of European disciplinarity.6 Much like the claim to a universal that was fundamental to European notions of ecology as articulated by Haeckel and others, Vaishnava speculations on 134  chap ter four

ether offered an analogous, albeit dissonant, universalism. Crucially, in Vaishnava interpretations, the formless matter of ether was both generated by and perceived through sound. As the Performance of Devotion to Hari reiterated, “I created ether from the word kṛṣṇāya [unto Krishna].”7 Ether, according to the text, was generated from Krishna’s name as aural presence. Then, it was through hearing, through sound, that ether could be comprehended in space. In such a formulation, the relationship between sound and space was distinctive. Of the five senses that were the building blocks of the objective world, only sound (sabda), rather than touch (sparsha), form (rupa), taste (rasa), and smell (gandha), unfolded in space. As early as the seventh or sixth century BCE, texts such as the Hidden Teachings of the Singers [of the Sāma Veda] (Chāndogyopaniṣad) had unequivocally delineated the relationship among ether, sound, and space: “Through the ether [akasa] we call, through the ether we hear, through the ether we answer. In the ether as space we rejoice (when we are together), and rejoice not (when we are separated). In the ether everything is born, and towards the ether everything tends when it is born.”8 This conception of expansive ether that connects subjects through sound provided a different imagination of space, one that was more universal than that of the cardinal directions (disah).9 It is this universal that would subsequently provide a genealogy to patrons such as Kundanlal to articulate a Vaishnava cosmopolitanism in the era of colonial modernity by combining a new iconography of ether with architectural forms reminiscent of contemporaneous British structures in colonial metropolitan cities such as Calcutta and Bombay (now Mumbai). By the time of the construction of Shahji Temple in Vrindavan, Braj had already formally become a part of the British empire. In 1832, the territories that constituted British-­occupied Braj were incorporated into the newly formed Mathura District with its headquarter in the town of Mathura. The formation of the district subsequently led to the establishment of a cohesive colonial administrative structure under the office of the Magistrate. In the 1840s, modern hospitals, schools, jails, printing presses, and a strong police system were introduced.10 It is in this milieu that we find the merchant Shah Kundanlal constructing a temple on the banks of the river Yamuna on a plot of land adjacent to a sixteenth-­century red-­sandstone pavilion built by the Kachhwaha ruler Man Singh I, the patron of the 1590 Govind Dev Temple. Two distinct approaches to architecture came together in Kundanlal’s 1868 temple. On the one hand, the use of European neoclassical architecture situated the temple in an expansive worldly horizon. On the other hand, the unprecedented use of figural imagery of musicians and dancers responding to music on both the temple’s interior and exterior façade produced an iconography of ether, the primal element that could only be discerned in sound (figure 4.2). In contrast to the intersections we have seen between Braj’s sacred ecosystem and its localized aesthetic configurations, the range of citations discernible in Kundanlal’s 1868 temple opens our enquiry to the idea of the global in e ther  135

4.2. Female figures. Sculpture on exterior façade, Shahji Temple, Vrindavan, 1868.

Braj. Undoubtedly, the appearance of transcultural visual forms in societies across the world through trade networks and migration patterns has elicited significant attention in recent years.11 The geography of art (Kunstgeographie), as Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann notes, reveals how art histories can be written beyond older paradigms centered on ethnicities, regions, empires, or nation-­ states.12 Within art history, concept-­terms such as deterritorialization, hybridity, mestizaje, and creolization have offered ways to envisage entanglements and encounters on a global scale.13 Shah Kundanlal’s 1868 neoclassical temple allows for the conception of an eco art history that is attuned to such global arrangements, for the move from Kunstgeographie to geoaesthetics that the iconography of ether prompts makes possible a critical mediation that connects human communities to the natural world on both local and worldly scales. Simultaneously, the mobilization of the term ether—akasa—offers an alternative genealogy for an eco art history not centered on notions of the ecology as articulated by Kundanlal’s European contemporaries during the mid-­ nineteenth century.

The Neoclassical as Cosmopolitanism Originally from Lucknow, the capital of the kingdom of Awadh in north India, Shah Kundanlal migrated to Vrindavan in 1856, immediately after the British occupied Awadh, exiling its monarch Wajid Ali Shah (1822–87) to Cal­cutta.14 While little is known of the merchant’s career in Lucknow, hagiographic accounts hint that Kundanlal was a close associate of the monarch.15 The merchant’s hasty departure was perhaps a direct consequence of Wajid Ali Shah’s 136  chap ter four

4.3. Radharaman Temple, Vrindavan, 1826.

exile. Unlike most of Lucknow’s courtiers who moved to the British capital of Calcutta with Wajid Ali Shah, Kundanlal, however, chose to migrate to Vrindavan. This decision was not coincidental. Kundanlal’s grandfather, Shah Bihari Lal, a banker from Lucknow, had sponsored an important temple in the town and purchased villages in the vicinity to maintain an estate there.16 The 1826 Radharaman Temple that he built was modeled on Braj’s eighteenth-­century structures, such as Gangamohan Kunj (figure 4.3). Like most eighteenth-­ century temples, Radharaman was a beige-­sandstone, flat-­roofed building embellished with cusped arches, baluster columns, and intricate floral patterns overlooking an open courtyard. Within two years of moving to Vrindavan, Kundanlal acquired 6.67 acres of land on the riverfront and began building his new temple. Kundanlal’s decision to construct a temple on the banks of the river Yamuna is not surprising. What is surprising is the merchant’s decision to build the temple with a European neoclassical façade reminiscent of contemporaneous British architecture in colonial metropolitan cities. Embellished with a pediment and a tympanum, this was the first temple to break from Vrindavan’s distinctive architecture e ther  137

4.4. Exterior façade, Shahji Temple, Vrindavan, 1868.

typologies (figure 4.4). Constructed of marble and kiln-­baked bricks, materials that were extremely unusual in Braj’s architecture, Shahji Temple was set on a high platform with a staircase leading to a projecting, neoclassical, hexastyle front portico (figure 4.5). In the nineteenth century, neoclassical architecture built by the British had acquired a special resonance in the colonies. The conjunction of the “new” with the “classical” allowed for the imagination of an empire that drew its ideological foundation from the empires of antiquity.17 Although the term itself did not gain traction in art and architecture history until the 1880s, the aesthetics and moral genealogies of the idea of the neoclassical may be traced through Enlightenment rationality and the eighteenth-­century art history of Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Antoine-­Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy, among others.18 In most instances, neoclassicism was a call for a modern rationality centered on an inventive reclamation of an imagined European classical past. In turn, with the construction of imperial structures, such as Charles Wyatt’s 1803 Government House in Calcutta and the 1833 Town Hall 138  chap ter four

4.5. Ground plan, Shahji Temple, Vrindavan, 1868.

in Bombay, the neoclassical style, with its genealogies in the Palladian order, was transformed into a metaphor of colonial governance (figure 4.6). As such, the origins of this style lay in the neoclassicism of British architects such as William Chambers (1723–96) and Robert Adam (1728–92). Wyatt (1758–1819), for instance, utilized Adam’s 1760 Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire as a model for the Government House in Calcutta, the residence of the Governor General of India (figure 4.7).19 At face value, it is this architecture of domination that Kundanlal appropriated in designing his 1868 temple. A grand staircase leads to the front portico of both the Government House in Calcutta and Shahji Temple in Vrindavan. Both structures are also crowned by a triangular pediment held up by classical columns. Even as the differences in the two edifices are noteworthy, Shahji Temple in Vrindavan can perhaps be read as an attempt by patrons such as Kundanlal to shape an indigenous modernity that was commensurate or coeval with imperial logics of power and display. Blurring the difference between a temple to Krishna and the formal residence of the governor general e ther  139

4.6. Charles Wyatt, Government House, Calcutta, 1803. Photo courtesy iStock.com/ Vasuki Rao.

4.7. Robert Adam, north front, Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire, 1760. Photo © National Trust Images/Rupert Truman.

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of India, Kundanlal appears to have symbolically destabilized an imperialist rhetoric that marked out the distinctions between European and indigenous architecture in the colony. Given the discourses of power and authority that surrounded British neoclassical architecture in South Asia, Kundanlal’s attempt to make the style of the master his own raised the ire of the British government almost immediately. Comparing Shahji Temple to the “disreputable” casinos of London, the collector of the Mathura District, Frederic S. Growse, for instance, criticized Kundanlal for his “abominable” appropriation of modern European styles.20 Growse’s discomfort with Kundanlal’s temple was perhaps an expansion of a larger imperial debate on the new practice of the indigenous elite building in European styles. Six years before the consecration of Shahji Temple in Vrindavan, the influential architecture historian James Fergusson had already affirmed that “no native of India can well understand either the origin or motive of the various parts of our Orders. . . . [I]n the vain attempt to imitate his superiors, he has abandoned his own beautiful art to produce the strange jumble of vulgarity and bad taste we find in Lucknow and elsewhere.  .  .  . Nothing . . . could more clearly show the utter degradation to which subjection to a foreign power has depressed . . . than the examples of the bastard style just quoted.”21 Indeed, by the 1840s, neoclassical palaces, mosques, and temples built by the indigenous elite had become emblematic of the nineteenth-­century urban landscape. In Calcutta, for instance, Rajendra Mullick (1819–87), a wealthy merchant with a penchant for collecting European art, built a massive residence in 1835 with a neoclassical façade based on the Government House (figure 4.8). In the hands of the unidentified architect, the austere surfaces of Adam’s neoclassical edifices came to be supplanted by exuberant ornamentation. In the case of Mullick’s mansion in Calcutta, the pediment was profusely embellished with floral wreaths and vegetal decoration. In Vrindavan, the introduction of Mughal-­style kiosks, or chattris, crowning the pediment, the projecting eaves with brackets and balustrades with repeating roundels that allowed air to flow freely into the second story, along with an elongated frontage, distinguished Shahji Temple from the Government House in Calcutta. It is this indigenous reshaping of the neoclassical that Fergusson had denounced as a failure on the part of the South Asian elite to comprehend European architecture orders. What was at stake, however, was not merely a question of miscomprehension but the colonizer’s discomfort with the colonized’s attempt to wrest modern architecture from the West. However, even as the neoclassical portico of Kundanlal’s temple undoubtedly situates the structure within British architecture paradigms, the temple’s diverse elements resist easy taxonomies that take us directly back to the metropole. One enters the temple complex through a gateway modeled on Lucknow’s 1784 Roman Gateway, or Rumi Darwaza, built by Asaf al-­Daula (1748–97), the e ther  141

4.8. Mullick Mansion, Calcutta, 1835.

fourth ruler of Awadh (figure 4.9). The towering Rumi Gateway, a gateway to the royal Imambara, the hall for celebrating Muharram in Lucknow, had been built as a relief project during a calamitous 1784 drought (figure 4.10).22 Positing themselves as heirs to the Mughal legacy, the Awadh monarchs cited—not in terms of syntax but in terms of scale—earlier monumental Mughal gateways, for example the ca. 1573 Victory Gateway or Buland Darwaza in Akbar’s capital in Fatehpur Sikri, to situate their own cultural politics within the Islamicate ethos of early modern north India (figure 4.11). In contrast, drawing from a range of sources including the thirtieth surah of the Qur’ān, the sūrat al-­Rūm, which refers to the Byzantine-­Sassanid war that occurred in the beginning of the seventh century, the title Roman, or Rumi, referred to the Eastern Roman Empire.23 After the fall of Constantinople in 1483, the Ottoman emperor Mehmed II (1432–81) declared himself the Roman Emperor, the kayser-­i Rum.24 The gateway thus allowed the Awadh monarchy to situate their capital city of Lucknow within a grid of intelligibility that stretched from Mughal India to Rum, the imperial ideal of the Islamic world. By the seventeenth century, the term Rum had accrued an architectural connotation as well, with the phrase ṭarz-­i Rūm standing in for Ottoman imperial architecture.25 Consequently, from Bahr al-­Rum (the Mediterranean, one of 142  chap ter four

4.9. (Above, left) Gateway, Shahji Temple, Vrindavan, 1868. 4.10. (Above, right) Roman Gateway (Rumi Darwaza), Lucknow, 1784. Photo courtesy iStock.com/ saiko3p. 4.11. (Left) Victory Gateway (Buland Darwaza), Fatehpur Sikri, ca. 1573.

e ther  143

the earth’s principal seas in medieval geography) to Bilad al-­Rum (the land of the Romans), the term Rum had by the eighteenth century acquired a long history that could be tracked back to the Byzantine, Seljuk, and Ottoman empires.26 But what potential could Rum—as both an architectural and a geopolitical concept—have in a Hindu pilgrimage site in the era of colonial modernity? The idea of Rum was, of course, already in circulation in Mughal South Asia. Not long after his accession to the throne, the emperor Jahangir declared, “When I became emperor, it occurred to me that I should change my name lest it be confused with the caesars of Rum [qayāṣirat-­i rūm].”27 Within an early modern Islamic imperial realm, the reference was to the Ottoman empire. In a 1617 portrait of Jahangir attributed to the Mughal artist Abu’l-­Hasan (fl. 1600–30), the twenty-­six cartouches surrounding the emperor seated on a throne pronounced his unequaled sovereign power.28 Inter-­regional rivalries surface as one of the cartouches declare, “Only to look at the figure of Shah Jahangir, the kings of Rum and China stand waiting at the door.”29 Such an expansive conception of space was not limited to South Asia. In late eighteenth-­and early nineteenth-­century Malay literature, legends of Raja Rum, the mythical king of the land of Rum, played an emblematic role in conceptualizations of a capacious worldly outlook. In a period of escalating European domination, this distant and powerful king’s authority came to be identified with a form of symbolic sovereignty. According to a chronicle documented by the British linguist William Marsden in 1770s Johor, the king of Rum (in Malay narratives, a mighty monarch who inhabited a magical land, possessed untold wealth, and exerted unlimited power), Raja Cina (the Eastern king), and the founder of the Johor Minangkabau dynasty were the three sons born from Iskandar’s marriage to the daughter of the ocean.30 While the imaginary of a legendary Rum had a specific resonance in the largely Muslim Indian Ocean world, by the time Kundanlal faithfully reproduced Lucknow’s Rumi gateway within the liturgical space of Vrindavan, the pilgrimage site had been brought under colonial rule, and the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar II (1775–1862) had died in exile. It is difficult to distinguish between the two gateways, one built for a temple to Krishna and the other as an entrance to a Muslim imambara, a structure used for observing Muharram, the first month of the Islamic lunar calendar. Indeed, several features link the two, including the Mughal-­styled kiosk capping the structure, the repeating cartouches that function as a frame, the projecting lotus petal ornamentation, and the cusped entrance. Beyond formal similarities, both structures also include technological innovations, such as ornately carved finials placed between the flower petals from which water would spout out as a spectacular visual effect. While the display of cascading water might have had an especially explicit connotation in drought-­ravaged Lucknow, Kundanlal incorporated the hydroaesthetics of this technological 144  chap ter four

4.12. Marble fountain, Shahji Temple, Vrindavan, 1868.

innovation within a theological system that had already centralized the beholding of water as part of liturgical practice. Kundanlal’s temple was inundated with water imagery. Immediately upon entering the temple complex, the devotee faces two extraordinary marble fountains flanking the central portico (figure 4.12). Using an inventive pumping system, water from the adjacent Yamuna was made to flow into the temple’s courtyard and form intricate channels of running water on the terrace. Elevated marble seats intended for musical performances were placed within the basin. The marble podiums were not just surrounded by water but were also decorated with serrated incisions that emulated the undulation of flowing water. It is as if the Yamuna itself had entered the temple complex, and the temple, in turn, floated on the sacred waters of the river. In an interview, Shah K. S. Gupta, Kundanlal’s descendant and the current titleholder of the temple, reminisced about the enchanted performances that would have occurred in summer evenings when musicians would sing to Krishna encircled by water from the Yamuna gushing out of the marble finials.31 Emerging from the finials, water would then run through the curvilinear marble channels that mimicked the Yamuna’s meandering flow through Braj. In effect, the acts of hearing and seeing were connected through a singular aesthetic system. The water of the river entered the sanctum sanctorum as e ther  145

4.13. Marble fountain in sanctum, Shahji Temple, Vrindavan, 1868.

well, channeled through a smaller, lotus-­shaped fountain (figure 4.13). Placed directly in front of the deity, water from the fountain not only moistened the interiors of the temple but also created a visual effect akin to the display of water through which one entered the temple complex. Today, one can only imagine, in a retrospective mode, the temple’s sensescape as it interwove the sound of music, the sight of shimmering white marble, and the tactile moistness of the river’s water as it saturated architecture. While the cognitive associations between seeing and hearing that are discernable here resonated throughout the temple’s iconographic program, the citation of Lucknow’s architecture extended past the gateway. A pair of fish— the Awadh monarchy’s royal insignia—prominently flanks the central pediment of the temple’s façade (figure 4.14). In Lucknow, the use of this particular fish motif was strictly restricted to structures patronized by the monarchy. While the fish as an insignia had a long history in pre-­Mughal South Asia, the 146  chap ter four

4.14. West Gateway, Qaisar Bagh Palace, Lucknow, ca. 1850. Albumen print by Felice Beato, 25.2 × 29.8 cm, 1858. Repository: J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, partial gift from the Wilson Centre for Photography, 2007.26.205.49. Photo courtesy J. Paul Getty Museum.

mahi-­ye maratib (literally, “fish of dignity”) was the highest honor bestowed by the Mughal emperor from the time of Shah Jahan.32 The Awadh monarchy had been awarded this order in 1720.33 Kundanlal’s citational architecture can thus be read as an exilic remembering of his home or an act of commemorating Lucknow. The translation of such metaphors of power within the context of Vaishnava temple architecture in colonized Vrindavan, however, presented a far more complex maneuver, as we will see. If we enter Shahji Temple through Rum, Lucknow, and Mughal gateways, the Solomonic columns adorning the façade claimed for Shahji Temple the Western Roman empire (figure 4.15). Although helical columns with the axis of the shaft cut to a gentle spiral were frequently used in late antiquity, it is assumed that this typology had been first developed in the temple of Solomon in Jerusalem (hence, the name Solomonic column).34 The representation of the ciborium of the Basilica of St. Peter’s on a ca. 400 CE ivory reliquary found in the altar of Hermagoras in Samagher suggests that the column type had perhaps been used in the baldachin of the Old St. Peter’s.35 Although artists, including Raphael and Peter Paul Rubens, often depicted this column type in e ther  147

4.15. (Above) Solomonic columns. Front portico, Shahji Temple, Vrin­ davan, 1868. 4.16. (Right) Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Baldachin, Saint Peter’s Basilica, Rome, 1624–33.



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4.17. High altar, Basilica of Bom Jesus, Goa, seventeenth century. Photo courtesy American Council for Southern Asian Art (ACSAA) Collection, Regents of the University of Michigan, Department of the History of Art, Visual Resources Collections.

paintings and tapestries, its usage in architecture was not widespread until the early seventeenth-­century construction of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s bronze Solomonic columns of the baldachin in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome (figure 4.16).36 Almost immediately, the Solomonic column was mobilized across the Catholic world. From the 1670 retablo of La Compañía in Cuzco to José Benito de Churriguera’s 1692 altar in San Esteban in Salamanca, the global history of this column type is, by now, well known.37 In England, however, the Solomonic column was infrequently used, perhaps given the strong association of the column type with Catholic Rome.38 Solomonic columns first entered the architectural vocabularies of South Asia in the mid-­seventeenth century through Jesuit church architecture, for instance in Bom Jesus in the Portuguese colony of Goa, where similar columns had been prominently used in the high altar (figure 4.17).39 By the 1680s, the column type e ther  149

4.18. Sanctum doorway, Sas Bahu Temple, Gwalior, 1093. Photo courtesy American Institute of Indian Studies, Accession no. 47235, Negative no. AIIS 344.46.

had reached Macao and the Philippines in the form of portable altars made by silversmiths from South Asia.40 But except in Jesuit ecclesiastic contexts, this particular column type was not as commonplace in South Asia as it had been in the Portuguese and Spanish colonies in the Americas.41 Engaged columns with incised twisted patterns, however, were frequently used in temple architecture from the tenth century onward. The columns flanking the sanctum of the 1093 CE Sas Bahu Temple in Gwalior and the eleventh-­century Chandravati Temple in Rajasthan, for instance, were decorated with a fluted pattern (figure 4.18). An analogous pattern is also visible in Mughal architecture from the time of Shah Jahan.42 Despite the employment of such motifs in the longue durée, freestanding fluted columns with a twisted shaft did not appear in north India until the construction of Shahji Temple in 1868. Why then did Shah Kundanlal choose an obscure column type, at least in the context of north India, to mark the façade of his temple? Perhaps he had seen an engraving of Bernini’s legendary baldachin and had found in its curious 150  chap ter four

form a welcome relief from the severity of the British neoclassical order? A close iconographic reading of the column type does indicate that its genealogies lay in early modern Catholic architecture. Yet in the columns’ internal form and spiraling dynamic lies the prospect of vertiginous ascension that transcends its original function and symbolic connotation within Catholic ecclesiastical contexts. In Kundanlal’s temple, the twisted columns of the façade were positioned immediately behind the large fountains and the water pools upon whose shimmering surfaces the white marble columns would have reflected. The fountains and pools have now fallen into disuse, though Shah K. S. Gupta, Kundanlal’s descendant, recollects that in the 1950s, the fountains would still be regularly cleaned prior to festive occasions, when they would be ceremonially turned on. The water, it seems, rose to a height of five feet. Its effect, Gupta recalled, simulated the spiraling movement of the Solomonic columns, while the marble spirals, in turn, echoed the soaring motion of projecting jets of water. The Solomonic columns, then, became incorporated within the architectonics of a theological schema that bound Vaishnava ecological aesthetics with architectural forms conceived at a place far distant from the immediate worlds of Krishna’s habitation. Shahji Temple thus became a tangible manifestation of a cognitive perception of an expansive worldly milieu. Even as the neoclassical façade and the Solomonic columns were integral to the temple’s architecture, Kundanlal inscribed colonial British architecture within another oikos through an array of global citations. It is here that cosmopolitanism is a useful strategy with which to imagine Shahji Temple beyond the strictures of a purportedly derivative neoclassicism. Building on previous theorizations on cosmopolitanisms, we might even envisage the cosmopolitanism of an eco art history as offering a system of visualizing large-­scale biospheric networks that hold together both animate and inanimate subjects and objects.43 The aesthetic and worldly loop that the play of reflections between European columns and projecting jets of water set in motion finds a visual corollary on the temple’s façade. The soaring Solomonic columns of Kundanlal’s temple support a façade with a triangular pediment. At the very center of the tympanum, where an icon of Krishna would conventionally be placed, appears a large sculpture of a woman playing a musical instrument (see figure 4.4).44 A row of sculpted figures of women dancing in response to music embellishes the roofline, inaugurating an iconographic program that was unprecedented in Vaishnava architecture (see figure 4.2). Undoubtedly, the soundscape of a temple—incantations, sacred bells, the shuffling of devotees’ feet—plays a crucial role in the auditory experience of architecture. Certainly, Vaishnava temple architecture was fundamentally altered in the seventeenth century to create space for a specific form of congregational singing and dancing known as kirtan, as others have argued.45 But never before had a sculpture of a woman musician replaced the figure of the divine Krishna on a temple’s lintel. e ther  151

4.19. Claude Martin, Constantia, Lucknow, 1802.

If the neoclassical pediment was an extraordinary intrusion in the ecumenical worlds of Braj, the repeated arrangement of figures playing musical instruments and figures moving in coordinated response to melodious sound on the balustrade of the structure was equally unmatched. The origins of this architectural innovation lay in the patron’s hometown of Lucknow, where a French mercenary, Claude Martin (1735–1800), had designed a palatial residence in the 1790s with a line of stucco sculptures in full silhouette on the parapet (figure 4.19). Martin’s architectural intercession was undoubtedly very popular in Lucknow; by the nineteenth century, the monarchs of Lucknow, too, had started including lines of sculptures on buildings (see figure 4.14). While the employment of architectural sculpture in this manner might take us to back to St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, whose colonnades include one hundred and forty sculptures by Bernini and his students, Shahji was the first instance of

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a Europeanized balustrade in Braj, with a row of sculptures standing against the sky. There was, however, a theological matrix within which these figures became legible. The matrix was the idea of expansive ether that could only be comprehended through sound. Ether, as the Performance of Devotion to Hari affirms, had emanated from the word krishnaya as the efficacious sound of sacred syllables. Theologians such as Rupa Goswami reiterated that Krishna could be physically, perceptually, and cognitively present in the sonic utterance of his name. Chaitanya’s ecstatic singing and dancing was thus the “most auspicious sound . . . which filled the fourteen worlds and pervaded the universe,” according to his biographer, Kaviraja.46 The very practice of kirtan in praise of Krishna as introduced by Chaitanya was the foundation of the acoustic ecologies of Vaishnava liturgy. A popular Gaudiya Vaishnava adage affirms this connection between sound and space: “Wherever there is kirtan, there is Vrindavan, and the endless flow of pleasure.”47 Both worldly and transcendental Vrindavan could thus be revealed through the efficacious act of collective singing. Nevertheless, except for unsewn cloths used during sacerdotal rituals that were embellished with the name of Krishna (namabali; literally, “row of names”), there was no system of visual representation capable of picturing the centrality of efficacious sound that was a core practice of Vaishnavism.48 While liturgical manuscripts with written text had been customarily venerated in South Asia, there existed no system of visualizing sacrosanct words in Vaishnava architectural practice.49 But by the early nineteenth century, votive paintings, woodblock prints, and icons of Chaitanya rapturously singing Krishna’s name with his arms raised circulated across the Gaudiya networks of which Kundanlal was a part.50 The visual iconography of this particular form of sonic devotion had perhaps emerged from sculptural reliefs of Chaitanya performing kirtan that are found on early modern terracotta temples in Bengal, the region Chaitanya hailed from and where Gaudiya Vaishnavism had taken deep roots.51 The façade of Shahji Temple in Vrindavan was only one step removed from this iconography of depicting the liturgy of sound. Chaitanya did not appear on the façade of Kundanlal’s temple. Instead, the sculptures of musicians and dancers with both arms raised amalgamated and condensed aurality and performative bodily gesture into mnemonic devices or iconographic interjections that gave sound visual form. This, then, was the cognition of ether or Krishna’s name as elemental capaciousness. While scholars in the recent past have analyzed the role of music and prayer, among other acoustic regimes, in the synesthetic design of architecture and urban spaces, the key difference here was an attempt to visualize sound.52 Although not sonic, an iconography of visualizing ether, or the infinitude of the universe, as a mandala was in place in early modern Braj. In Vrindavan, for instance, theologians visualized the 1590 Govind Dev as the pericarp of the lotus mandala of

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an immeasurable cosmographic Braj. Art historians, too, have proposed that the iconography of the Hindu temple makes visible the intimate correlation between sacred architecture and the element of ether.53 Built approximately three hundred years prior to Shahji, Govind Dev, of course, belonged to a different historical milieu. Shahji Temple’s iconography of ether as sound was situated within the here and now of colonial Braj. The British conquered Shah Kundanlal’s birthplace of Lucknow in 1856, and although Braj had been brought under British rule in the early nineteenth century, the decades of the 1850s and the 1860s saw unprecedented anti-­British agitation in the region.54 The Indian uprising of 1857–58, now designated as the first war of independence, had just occurred, and the subcontinent, especially north India, was still reeling under the violence unleashed by a vengeful British government. We will turn in the next section to the recalcitrant Vaishnava aesthetics of Shah Kundanlal that surfaced under the double threat of colonial governmentality and a post-­1857 emergent middleclass Hinduism. But it is worth recapitulating the philosophical potency of ether, not merely at the level of the allegorical or the symbolic, but as elemental capaciousness in post-­1857 Braj. At first glance, the concept of ether as it emerged in Vaishnava philosophy and liturgy seems homologous with Ernst Haeckel’s oecologie. Undeniably, both point toward a dynamic structure of interconnectedness across space, speciesist distinctions, and biotic and abiotic matter. Where the idea of ether constitutively differs from modern European scientific theorizations of the ecosystem is in the centrality of the sound of Krishna’s name as all-­pervasive elemental substance from which the world materializes. Indeed, according to Vaishnava texts such as the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, ether—elemental space— encompasses the vastness in which everything lives and functions.55 Similar to Aristotle’s first body, or quinta essentia, and the Stoics’ pneuma, the material that holds the world together, ether as akasa is neither void nor emptiness but all-­pervasive formless substance that connects the universe.56 Derived from the word kāś, to shine, with the prefix ā, the notion of akasa appeared in such texts as the Hidden Teachings of the Singers as the primary element from which the other elements came into existence.57 Equally important was the function of ether beyond phenomenal presence as “the closest approximation to ātman/brahman” or the expression of the absolute macrocosmic principle as sound.58 In time, the concept-­term akasa was used in contexts ranging from mathematics to medicine (Ayurveda).59 Writing retro­ spectively, the art historian Stella Kramrisch would also discern in temple architecture a concretization of the “all-­filling ākāśa.”60 While Kramrisch’s twentieth-­century response to the temple as akasa was intuitive, European scientists and scholars of the natural environment contemporaneous with the Vaishnava merchant Kundanlal were already cognizant of the notion of ether as akasa. Citing philologists such as Henry T. Colebrooke, Alexander von 154  chap ter four

Humboldt wrote about akasa in the third volume of his celebrated book Cosmos, which was based on a series of lectures in Berlin.61 Much later, the Russian occultist Helena P. Blavatsky, who established the Theosophical Society in 1875, described akasa as the “subtle, supersensuous spiritual essence which pervades all space,” while the Serbian physicist and engineer Nikola Tesla compared akasa to the ether of classical physics.62 Shah Kundanlal was likely unacquainted with the varied connotations that the term was rapidly accruing in Europe. But his iconographic conception of ether may have nonetheless served to conjunct the particularities of the local—the neoclassical temple’s placement in Vrindavan on the banks of the flowing Yamuna—with expansive vistas of the global that hovered at the horizons of the colonial world that he inhabited. Such a formulation also allows us to consider imaginative mobilities instituted through a cosmopolitanism that the literary theorist Rob Wilson describes as an “aesthetic of openness toward otherness.”63 Ether, consequently, functions in eco art history as both a metaphor and a tangible circumambient matter that literally connects subjects across vast spaces.

The Circle of Love Traversing the portico, we enter the main sanctum of Shahji Temple (figure 4.20). Unlike other temples in Braj, the inner sanctum (garbhagriha) of Shahji is separated from the mandapa, the central pavilion or the hall for worship, by a marble-­faced wall with three teak doors with louvered shutters and semicircular fanlights. It is through these doors that the devotee views the icon in the sanctum set behind an ornate marble fountain. The use of neoclassical doors with elaborate wooden tracery to demarcate the sanctum is undoubtedly exceptional, as is the temple’s ground plan. In contrast to the characteristic plan of temples where the icon faces the main entrance, the inner sanctum of Shahji is perpendicular to the portico through which devotees enter the structure. This layout implies that the devotee does not view the icon in the sanctum immediately upon entering the mandapa, as would have been anticipated or even expected. Instead of the icon, it is the pietra dura panels of feminine figures on all four walls of the central pavilion that the devotee first encounters. These resonate with the sculptures on the temple’s exterior façade. Enhanced by the natural granulation of stone, the use of pietra dura to highlight the intricacies of ornament and form seem to be a principled expansion into the interior of the European styles that shape the temple’s exterior façade. At first sight, the pietra dura figures may appear to be incredibly prosaic, especially in the context of religious architecture. Musicians can be seen with instruments, a female painter stands with brush in hand, dancers are represented in action, while a woman playfully feeds pigeons (figure 4.21). In several instances, loose, flowing skirts with a short upper garment and headgear e ther  155

4.20. Sanctum, Shahji Temple, Vrindavan, 1868.

reflect Lucknow’s distinctive sartorial cultures conceived under Wajid Ali Shah’s direction, further underscoring the commemorative function that the temple no doubt performed for its patron.64 Yet it is the theological framework of Vaishnavism that serves to ground the figures within the architecture of the temple complex, thus transcending the extravagances of elite urban life in Lucknow that the pietra dura panels otherwise invoke. It is within a theological framework that the otherwise unexpected ground plan of the temple also accrues an esoteric dimension. For the devotee is not only encircled by figural imagery upon entering the temple but is both corporeally and symbolically inserted into the loop formed by the pietra dura figures. The body of the devotee, the figural imagery on the walls, and the icon of Krishna in the sanctum become part of a relational system that resonates with the diagrammatic construction of the circular dance of the rasa mandala as it gained conceptual form in early modern Braj. As Krishnadasa Kaviraja wrote in the seventeenth century, “The rāsa celebration, adorned by a circle of gopīs, was begun by Yogeśvara [Lord of the yogis] Kṛṣṇa, between each pair of women who were embraced by him as he approached them, while each woman thought him to be her own.”65 Kaviraja’s point of reference was the 156  chap ter four

4.21. Dancing figure. Pietra dura panel, pavilion (mandapa), Shahji Temple, Vrindavan, 1868.

tenth book of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, which described the dance of the rasa mandala. The episode unfolded in a moonlit night by the river Yamuna in Vrindavan. Hearing Krishna’s magical flute, the enchanted cowherd girls or gopis of Vrindavan rushed to the river’s bank to meet the lord. As the evening progressed, Krishna replicated himself to embrace the women in joyous dance so that each devotee could individually experience Krishna’s presence.66 The dance, as described in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, culminated with each gopi holding Krishna in amorous devotion while forming a circle around Krishna and his consort Radha, the principal gopi. Of all the gopis who participated in the circular dance of the rasa mandala, eight were closest to Krishna and Radha, according to Vaishnava texts.67 Described as sakhis (close female attendants), these figures functioned simultaneously as devotees, friends, and attendants to e ther  157

Krishna and Radha, occasionally offering food and at other times engaging the divine couple with music and dance. It is these eight sakhis who are represented in the pietra dura panels in Shahji Temple. Although representations of sakhis had begun to appear in Vaishnava paintings in the early modern period, the depiction of such figures in the temples of Vrindavan was a phenomenon of the mid-­nineteenth century. There was a compelling reason for this new architectural presence. In the aftermath of the anti-­British uprisings of 1857, when the libidinous practices of early modern Vaishnavism in Braj had come under considerable censorship, the feminized figures offered patrons such as Kundanlal a performative agency grounded in theology. In a time of political precarity, the architectonic materialization of the sakhis and the consequent identification of devotees and patrons with these figures may have also supported the emergence of a differently aligned cosmopolitan Vaishnava subjectivity. As the first temple to include figural representations of sakhis in Braj, Shahji inaugurated a new iconographic program in the pilgrimage center. In Braj, this program would be taken up and further developed in a number of temples built in subsequent years, including the 1873 Radha Gopal Temple, commissioned by a merchant from Shahjahanpur, and the 1889 Ashta (eight) Sakhi Temple, patronized by a landlord from Bengal.68 Noting the iconographic similarities between the 1868 Shahji and the 1873 Radha Gopal, Growse, too, observed, “In imitation of the bad example thus set, a new temple dedicated to Radha Gopal was built. . . . It has a long frontage facing one of the principal streets, with a continuous balcony to the upper story, in which each pillar is a clumsily carved stone figure of a Sakhi, or ‘dancing girl.’ ”69 Sardonic tenor withstanding, Growse was correct in designating Shahji as a critical juncture in the emergence of a new form of temple architecture in Braj, one that was centered on the iconography of the sakhi. Painterly practices, however, had preceded such architectural interjections. The Kishangarh artist Nihalchand, for instance, had depicted sakhis awakening Krishna and Radha with a musical raga in the ca. 1745–50 painting, reproduced here as figure 3.2. That the identity of the attendant figure was of some theological significance is indicated by a poem inscribed on the reverse of the folio: Thus the night passed lying in pleasure and comfort When dawn came, knowing it was Hari’s [Krishna] time, the sakhīs came together The sweet and skillful Lalita took the vīnā and played it The wondrous rāg vibhās spread all around the grove enclosure The birds made a chirping at this charming time of pleasure The cool breeze comes to them, touching the pollen, the lotuses and the water.70 158  chap ter four

Notably, the text not only identifies the gopi as Lalita, the principal attendant or sakhi to the divine couple, but also reveals that she is performing the raga Bibhas, which is sung at dawn. The figure of Lalita, who also appears in Shahji Temple, will return to our deliberations, for it is with this figure that the patron Shah Kundanlal’s Vaishnava project remained most intimately associated. We will turn to Kundanlal’s self-­identification with the gopi Lalita, Radha and Krishna’s primary sakhi, shortly. Here, it is necessary to underscore the translations that occurred in the regimes of appearance in the mid-­nineteenth century as representations of sakhis moved from paper to stone, from the realm of painterly cultures to the domain of temple architecture, and from seeing to embodied engagement. Indeed, any devotee surrounded by the pietra dura sakhis engaged in service to Krishna in the mandapa of Shahji Temple could, in theory, become a part of the circular formation of the rasa mandala, thus joining the cowherd girls in uninhibited love for Radha and Krishna. Replicating the circular configuration of the rasa mandala, the patron had transformed a theological metaphor into stone. The visual representation of the rasa mandala, the circular dance with Radha and Krishna’s sakhis, was not Kundanlal’s invention. One of the first depictions of the rasa mandala can be found in the ca. 1520–40 Bhāgavata Purāṇa from Palam, a manuscript produced at a time when the theory and praxis of Vaishnavism was being consolidated in Braj. Emblematic of the devotional possibility in the concept of erotic love between the devotee as a gopi or sakhi and the divine as Krishna, the rasa mandala had indeed become one of the most compelling sites for artistic visualization of Vaishnava praxis. Over time, the circular dance also came to be depicted in murals on temples and palace walls across South Asia (figure 4.22). In Vrindavan, the inner frieze of Govind Dev Temple, too, had been envisaged as the rasa mandala. Thus, by the time of the construction of Shahji Temple, representations of the rasa mandala had already acquired a recognizable iconography. But, as such, illustrations of the circular dance of Krishna and the sakhis were contained within spatially bounded surfaces, for instance in manuscripts or murals and friezes with clearly demarcated borders. The innovation of Kundanlal’s temple was in the redeployment of this rasa mandala within an immersive architectonic construction that could be not only ritually seen but also inhabited performatively. As Deleuze and Guattari note, “The mandala is a projection on a surface that establishes correspondence between divine, cosmic, political, architectural, and organic levels.”71 Although novel, the possibility of performative inhabitation that Shahji Temple engendered was constitutively premised on a prior metaphysical internalization of the bhumandala, the orbic representation (mandala) of the cosmos (bhu). For the Bhāgavata Purāṇa clearly instructed devotees to first assimilate the bhumandala before entering the circle of love or the rasa mandala.72 The rasa mandala, then, had a very specific performative connotation in the e ther  159

4.22. Circular dance of Krishna and the cowherd women of Braj. Ceiling mural, Badal Mahal, Bundi Fort, Rajasthan, early seventeenth century. Photo courtesy Edward L. Rothfarb.

nineteenth century. It inscribed the metaphysical space of the bhumandala as transcendental Vrindavan where Krishna dances with gopis and sakhis eternally onto the real space of colonial Braj. In terms of Vaishnava praxis, the only technique to enter the planetary bhumandala was through apprehending Krishna as an embodiment of sound. This apprehension, sixteenth-­century theologians reiterated, could only occur through the utterance of mantras such as klīṁ kṛṣṇāya svāhā, a sacred incantation considered the foremost of all mantras and ascribed the eminence of the sound-­embodiment of Krishna.73 Such a conception of immanence circuitously returns us to akasa or ether, the elemental matter that is the cosmos, whose comprehension is possible only in sound.

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4.23. Siddhababa and Dhyanchandra, Meditative Device for the Eternal Activities of Vrindavan (Śrīśrīvr.ndāvananityalīlāyogapīt.hāmbhuja), n.d. Drawing on paper. Published in Haridasa Dasa, Gaud.¯ı ya Vais.n.ava Abhidha¯na. Republished in Stewart, Replicating Vais.n.ava Worlds, 308. Photo courtesy Tony K. Stewart.

Kundanlal’s temple abounds with imagery that alludes to sound. Sculptures on the temple’s exterior façade and the pietra dura representations of sakhis in the temple’s interior play musical instruments. Dancers further visually annotate an embodied response to music (see figure 4.21). Although Shahji was the first temple in Braj to mobilize such mnemonic imaginaries, it is likely that Gaudiya Vaishnava mandalas that were employed for meditative practices provided a model for the temple’s program. Indeed, Shahji’s iconographic conception finds a close corollary in mandalas on paper that mapped out the cosmological universe diagrammatically (figure 4.23).74 Such diagrams for ritual meditation centralized the principal mantra klīṁ kṛṣṇāya svāhā, the

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primordial sound out of which emerged ether. As the Performance of Devotion to Hari unambiguously stated, from the word kṛṣṇāya ether emerged.75 At the heart of the diagram, we see Sri Krishna and Sri Radha written in Bengali. Enfolding the divine couple’s names, also in Bengali, is the mantra klīṁ kṛṣṇāya svāhā. It is this primeval acoustic reverberation that governed the circular dance of the sakhis and gopis, whose appearance on Vaishnava mandalas was ordered in accordance with a spiritual hierarchy precipitated by sacramental mandates. The names of the eight principal sakhis, Lalita among them, are inscribed on lotus petals in the mandala reproduced here. As principal participants in the circle of love or the rasa mandala as described in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, their placement is closest to the embryonic aural core.76 Other sakhis appear in a hierarchical order of prominence in the outer circle of the diagram. The organizing principle of the drawing unfolds along a geographic axis with four directional goddesses at the four gateways of the diagram, thus enfolding the non-­dimensional space of ether into physical space. From here, the rendition of the mandala into architecture was but a short step. Consequently, an iconography of expansiveness as well as an experience of non-­dimensional space found shape in the concreteness of Shahji’s architecture. While the direct equivalence between ether as cosmic space and the temple as sacred space has not been part of the historiography of Hindu temple architecture, art historians have suggested that the temple was a “node between the flux of man’s world and eternity.”77 Yet in the era of colonial modernity, such a spectral vision of omnipresence perhaps had limited hold, as the sovereignty of both the colonial subject and his god faced the risk of erasure. Under such pressure, becoming visible or appearing in the eternal theater of the rasa mandala may have offered the patron a new mode of performative presence in the face of colonial hegemony. In such an operation of appearance, the space of architecture perhaps offered the possibility of concretely materializing a performative self to symbolically reclaim both self-­representation and the space of religion in the colonial public sphere. Indeed, a closer look at the pietra dura panels reveals that not all the sakhi figures in the interior of the temple are female. A figure engrossed in kirtan with a pair of drums is, in fact, a bare-­chested man whose garments reflect his gender but whose jewelry—the enormous pearl nose ring, for instance, and anklets with dangling bells—is distinctly feminine (figure 4.24). Palms resplendently aglow with red-­agate henna, the pietra dura figure joins the rasa mandala assembly, amalgamating with the female sakhis with apparently seamless ease. The gendered masquerade implicit in such a transgression had a direct corollary in the patron’s own practice. Taking up the name and persona of Lalita, Kundanlal published several volumes of poetry that exalted the erotic play of Krishna with the cowherd girls of Vrindavan.78 He even took up the feminine nom de plume of Lalitakisori, literally, “Lalita the young girl.” 162  chap ter four

4.24. Figure. Pietra dura panel, pavilion (mandapa), Shahji Temple, Vrindavan, 1868.

Kundanlal’s gendered masquerade as the sakhi Lalita had two distinct lineages. The first was intrinsically imbricated within the courtly cultures of Lucknow, where the Muslim monarch Wajid Ali Shah staged elaborate public performances based on Radha and Krishna’s erotic love with actors from Braj.79 Whether Wajid Ali Shah actually appeared in feminine attire as a sakhi in these plays, as music histories indicate, still remains unsubstantiated.80 But according to one contemporaneous British history of the annexation of Awadh, “dressed in female attire, Wajid Ali Shah entered into rivalry with Nautch girls.”81 The monarch’s experimentations in theater and dance might have inspired Kundanlal. A life-­size sculpture of Wajid Ali Shah placed in the upper gallery of Shahji Temple is reminiscent of such associations (figure e ther  163

4.25. (Left) Sculpture of Wajid Ali Shah, pavilion (mandapa), Shahji Temple, Vrindavan, 1868. 4.26. (Right) Ahmad Ali Khan, portrait of Wajid Ali Shah, ca. 1855. Albumen print with painted border and gold leaf, 29.8 × 21.4 cm. Repository: British Library, London, B20067-99 © The British Library Board. Photo courtesy British Library.

4.25). Despite the sacrosanct nature of the temple precinct, Wajid Ali Shah’s sculpture is remarkably mimetic. The facial features and flowing hair in the sculpture corresponds precisely with the few photographs of the monarch that survive from the 1850s (figure 4.26). An appearance of theatricality is inculcated in the slightly twisted torso and the calculated placement of a comparatively large fan in the right hand of the sculpture. The reference, perhaps, is to the monarch’s enactment of episodes from Krishna’s life in Lucknow. Wajid Ali Shah’s theater may well have provided Kundanlal with one sort of intercession. The second, and perhaps the more substantial, foundation for Kundanlal’s aesthetic and performative project undoubtedly emerged out of Gaudiya philosophy, which emphatically posited the female attendant, or sakhi, as the most cherished devotee of Krishna. Irrespective of gender, emulating the sakhi was 164  chap ter four

an ideal for all Vaishnava sects with varying degrees of literalness. Indeed, Vaishnava poetry, for the most part, was written from the perspective of key female protagonists, such as Yasodha (Krishna’s adoptive mother), Radha (Krishna’s beloved and primary devotee), and the gopis and sakhis of Braj. Although male initiates in certain sects, such as the Sahajiyas, also emphasized a physical transformation of the male devotee into a woman through clothing, feminine conduct, and occasionally self-­castration, post-­eighteenth-­ century Gaudiya Vaishnava theologians contended that devotees should mentally, rather than physically, imagine themselves as a female attendant-­friend, or sakhi.82 Despite Gaudiya injunctions, the physical impersonation of women sakhis as a form of worship known as sakhi bhava, the affective inculcation of sakhi-­ness, was commonplace in eighteenth-­century Braj. Yet even within the transgressive potentialities of sakhi bhava, Krishna, as the desired one, remained resolutely male and hence inscribed within a patriarchal order, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak notes in an essay on gender masquerade.83 The limits of masquerade withstanding, eighteenth-­century accounts describe male sakhi bhava devotees dressing in red loincloth to simulate menstruation.84 As we have seen, Kundanlal himself practiced sakhi bhava, taking up the name and persona of the sakhi Lalita.85 Significantly, by the time Kundanlal commissioned Shahji Temple, the practice of sakhi bhava had become subject to considerable derision, both within and outside Vaishnava communities. In 1862, the priests of a Vaishnava temple in Bombay took an Indian journalist, Karsandas Mulji, to court for publishing an article in a Bombay-­based Guajarati newspaper, Light of Truth (Satya Prakash), that presented devotional practices in Vaishnava temples as obscene and corrupt.86 Described as “the greatest trial of modern times since the trial of Warren Hastings,” the Maharaja Libel Case, as it came to be known, galvanized public debates on Krishna worship when the priests lost the battle in court, so much so that even Monier Monier-­Williams, the founder of the Indian Institute at the University of Oxford and the compiler of one of the most widely used Sanskrit-­English dictionaries, attended to the proceedings closely.87 Reflecting on the trial in 1878, Monier-­Williams wrote: But the Vallabhāchāryans interpreted that attachment [Krishna’s love for the gopis] in a gross and material sense. Hence their devotion to Krishna has degenerated into the most corrupt practices, and their whole system has become rotten to the core. Their men have brought themselves to believe that to win the favour of their god, they must assimilate themselves to females. Even the Mahārājas, or spiritual chiefs, the successors of Vallabhāchārya, are accustomed to dress like women when they lead the worship of their followers.88 Likewise, the north Indian indigenous literati vehemently criticized the effusive sexual undertones in Vaishnava erotic poetry written in eighteenth-­and e ther  165

nineteenth-­century Braj.89 That the figure of the “effeminate” native male, caricatured in colonial discourse vis-­à-­vis the “virile” Englishman, gave rise to nineteenth-­century assertions of an autochthonous masculine virility is, by now, well known.90 Indigenous responses to colonial aspersions of effeminacy led to the subsequent development of a new range of body cultures, including martial arts, athletics, and gymnastics, that were anticipated to revitalize the male Indian body.91 The intense scrutiny of Vaishnava practices that the much-­publicized Maharaja Libel Case precipitated would eventually also result in a considerable restructuring of the more libidinous aspects of such Krishna worship as sakhi bhava. Yet it is this much-­derided feminized body of the sakhi that Kundanlal not only performativity inhabited but also subtly foregrounded in his temple through the pietra dura male figure adorned with jewelry whose design corresponded precisely with those worn by the other female figures. Subtle, because this is the sole example of a male participant in the rasa mandala assembly in Shahji Temple. Shahji Temple, then, offered an entirely different response to the emasculating politics of colonialism. Rather than the hyper-­masculine modern subject of Enlightenment rationality capable of ordering the world as a reflection of his phallocentric self, the iconography of the 1868 temple cast the male body as a demasculinized site of spiritual aesthetics. Indeed, Kundanlal’s politics and aesthetics of demasculinization were articulated in opposition to the hegemonic hyper-­masculinity advocated by both the regulatory mechanisms of the British empire and a larger nationalist body culture in colonial India.

The Infinitude of Akasa Completed within six years of the Maharaja Libel Case, Kundanlal’s 1868 Shahji Temple brought together two distinct strands of iconography. On the one hand, the citation of Mughal, Awadhi, and Western motifs and forms produced an intersecting matrix for a cosmopolitan self-­constitution that was expansive in vision. On the other hand, the immanence of the icon dwelling in the temple transformed the space into more than a sign or a symbol of this cosmopolitanism. The iconographic program of the temple became a device to represent akasa—ether—ordered and encompassed by the omnipresent deity residing in the sanctum. But this ordering did not conform to the scientific rationality of European positivism. Indeed, within twenty years of the completion of Shahji Temple, Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley would conduct a series of experiments with light waves to conclusively prove that no substance called ether existed in the universe as matter that filled empty space.92 Nonetheless, for patrons such as Kundanlal, ether as akasa remained a compelling locus for imagining the mutual imbrication of both Rum and Rome, the east and the west, the local and the global, the old and the new, and the human and the environmental. It was the notion of the natural element of 166  chap ter four

ether as infinitely transcendental yet concretely physical that perhaps offered an architectonic metonymy of vortical infinitude in an era when freedom was at siege. Whatever claim to agency and performative self-­representation that the adoption of neoclassical architecture offered was after all merely symbolic, its resonances conscripted by the reaches of colonial power and control. Yet in the sphere of visibility, the reinscription of European forms within a planetary imaginary that emerged from the universalism of primordial sound, krishnaya as ether, may have opened up alternative ways of being-­in-­the-­world. Its subsequent resonances were significant. In the early twentieth century, Mohandas K. Gandhi, for instance, would return to the architectonics of elemental ether to reconceive the relationship between colonized bodies and “infinite space.”93 It is easy to enumerate how ecological systems are constituted by living organisms and by a whole complex of biotic and abiotic components, such as water and air, that are linked together by a larger network of multivalent interactions. The Little Ice Age was a phenomenon that connected landmasses and oceans across the planet in dynamic interaction. Structures such as the 1868 Shahji Temple precipitated a movement from biospheric networks to the geoaesthetics of an ecologically oriented art and architecture by linking philosophies of the ecosystem with the materiality of art and architectural practice. Ether, then, was the element that constituted, connected, and held a planetary imaginary of the colonized. That this planetary imaginary was not disconnected from the struggle for sovereignty that was unfolding in the colonial political arena is indicated by the presence of a room exclusively reserved for use during the vasant festival that marks the advent of spring (figure 4.27). Decorated with fifteen opulent Belgian glass chandeliers, enormous gilded mirrors, and glittering lengths of silk, the Vasanti Kamra, the room (kamra) of the spring (vasant) festival, is located across the congregational hall, directly facing the sanctum sanctorum. At the very center of the room are three marble fountains set within a shallow rectangular pool whose shimmering surface is made even more irradiant with the refraction of light from the glass chandeliers. The decoration of the room—the chandeliers, the gilded architectural elements, the neoclassical sculptures of winged angels, and the abundant use of imported mirrors—further accentuate an effect of scintillating radiance. When the bejeweled icon of Krishna is placed within this mise-­en-­scène of scintillating radiance, the very materiality of imported luxury commodities begins to take on a different refractive potential. For the entire mise-­en-­scène finds a close descriptive corollary in an ekphrastic passage in the sixteenth-­ century Performance of Devotion to Hari that describes the fantastic land of Vrindavan: One should then meditate on the desire tree of Vṛndavāna. The fresh twigs of the desire trees can be compared to coral, the leaves can be compared e ther  167

4.27. Vasanti Kamra, Shahji Temple, Vrindavan, 1868. Photograph by Alan W. Entwistle, 1976–78. Photo copyright © Estate of Alan W. Entwistle, represented by Albertine Smit. Photo courtesy School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

to the blue sapphire, the buds can be compared to diamonds and pearls, and the fruits can be compared to rubies. . . . The land of Vṛndavāna is as brilliant as the rising sun and is decorated with golden columns, jewels, and raised platforms. The entire scene sparkles because of the golden pollen that has fallen from the trees. . . . One should then meditate on an excellent throne that is placed upon a raised platform bedecked with jewels. On that throne is a red lotus flower having eight petals. Next, one should meditate on how Śri Kṛṣṇa joyfully sits in the middle of that lotus, appearing like a rising sun.94 The glass chandeliers in the Vasanti Kamra, illuminated with the shimmering light of oil lamps, would cast a soft glow on the opulent mirrors, radiant like splendid jewels.95 Krishna, like a “rising sun,” would be seated on his bejeweled throne, bathed in a golden hue. In this multimodal vision of paradisiacal Vrindavan that was luminous with golden pollen, Krishna could play eternally with his devotees amid bejeweled trees. No doubt such early modern techniques of visualizing space informed the remaking of neoclassical architecture in post-­1857 Braj. It is precisely the 168  chap ter four

engagement with an aesthetics of both the past and the present that also makes Shah Kundanlal’s architectural interpolations symptomatic of subjectivities fashioned under colonialism. Rather than a wholesale rejection of the past under the sign of colonial modernity, early modern practices ranging from cultures of the body to architecture were manipulated and reshaped by Vaishnava actors such as Kundanlal. Modernity was thus reconfigured through disparate practices that were obdurately cosmopolitan and worldly but emerged from a dense cluster of older belief systems. As the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty writes, “Ideas acquire materiality through the history of bodily practices. . . . The past is embodied through a long process of training the senses.”96 Modern religious architecture created through an appropriation of neoclassical styles, then, became the site through which the deterritorialized space of colonial governance was (re)inhabited as the expansive oikos of a recalcitrant Vasihnava aesthetics of demasculinization. By the time Shah Kundanlal set about fashioning his exceptional temple, the Little Ice Age had drawn to a close. Between 1855 and 1870, glaciers in the Alps had started to retreat, signaling the general change in temperature in Europe after the long cooling that had begun with the expansion of Alpine glaciers in the sixteenth century.97 Based on meteorological data, climate historians have noted that the rainfall during the monsoon significantly increased by the 1860s in northwest India, although some years saw less rain.98 In the subsequent decades, South Asia would still face famines of unprecedented scale resulting in millions of deaths caused by the devastating grain-­export policies of the colonial government, a phenomenon described in economic histories as the late Victorian holocaust.99 But by the 1860s, the climatic upheavals of the Little Ice Age had diminished. It is difficult to ascertain if Shah Kundanlal was aware of the larger global changes in climatic patterns. But he would have been conscious of the exuberance that no doubt followed when monsoon rain began to occur on a regular basis. For us, however, the temple opens up the possibility of locating architecture within a deep matrix that straddles political imaginaries, ecological imperatives, and aesthetic form.

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Coda Geoaesthetics in a Hindu Pilgrimage Town

Ramachandra Temple in the western Indian city of Jaipur is not very different from the countless temples that mark India’s urban landscape. As in every other temple, the resident priest lights a camphor lamp to the deity every evening to mark the end of the day. Offering water, flowers, and incense to the sound of the conch and devotional hymns, the deity is appeased. Then, after worshiping the icon, the priest at this temple turns to a framed print hung on a wall beside the sanctum. The ca. 1950 lithograph depicting the pilgrimage site of Braj is offered equal attention (figure C.1). Incense, water, and fire from the camphor lamp is ritually offered. With great care, the priest runs a finger over the roadways delineated in the print. Evening worship is then formally concluded.1 Conversations with the temple priest revealed that his father had acquired the lithograph during a pilgrimage to Braj in the early 1950s.2 At some point in the mid-­1950s, this lithograph depicting Krishna performing miraculous deeds, devotees worshiping the divine lord, and animals beloved to Krishna framed by a meandering roadway that marks the pilgrimage route in the region was framed and placed adjacent to the sanctum (figure C.2). This particular ritual—the act of traveling through the forests of Braj by tenderly tracing the roadways on a printed image with one’s finger—has no historical antecedent or theological validation. Neither have I seen this ritual performed in other temples. However, the corporeal topophilia inherent in this performative gesture is not entirely out of place. As we have seen, Braj, according to sixteenth-­century pilgrimage manuals such as the Glories of Mathura, was a topographic form of the divine (deha rupaka). By running his finger through the roads depicted in the print, the priest of Ramachandra Temple was thus circumambulating both the geographic space of Braj and Krishna himself as embodied space. At the same time, the haptic gesture in this ritual 171

C.1. Map of Circumambulatory Route of Braj (Braj Chaurasi Kos ki Naksha), ca. 1950. Color lithograph printed by Manohar Lal, Mathura, size not known.

engagement with space enabled an alternative synesthetic mode of embodied vision, a mode of seeing that Deleuze and Guattari describe as the “nonoptical function” of the eye.3 In this instance, impacting the nervous system and intensifying sensation, touch produces a perceptible relation between the viewer and the image. Such a “haptical figure of contact” speaks of the experience “of being and the world,” to use Jacques Derrida’s words.4 Touch is grounding. At a more quotidian level, devotional service (seva) to Krishna also involved palpable kinesthetic performative acts such as bathing, adorning, and even feeding the icon in a temple.5 As liturgical manuals such as the Performance of Devotion to Hari affirm, “The sinful reactions accumulated during the previous one hundred thousand lifetimes of a person who wipes Sri Hari [Krishna] with a cloth after bathing Him are nullified.”6 It is this touch as liturgical practice that the 1950s lithograph in Ramachandra Temple in Jaipur foregrounds. 172 coda

C.2. Map of Circumambulatory Route of Braj (Braj Chaurasi Kos ki Naksha), ca. 1950, in worship in Ramachandra Temple, Jaipur.

The lithograph is also emblematic of the themes charted in this book. We began with mid-­sixteenth-­century visual tactics of framing flowing water in paintings and riparian architecture that emerged in the first decades of the Little Ice Age. The hydroaesthetics of beholding the river Yamuna’s passage through Braj provided a point of departure from which to engage a range of artistic and architectural practices that brought to the forefront a reciprocal relationship between an aesthetics of venerating the natural environment and ecological catastrophes. Alongside the river Yamuna, it was the alchemic Govardhan hill and the enchanted groves of Braj that were simultaneously seen as natural and hierophanic by pilgrims, priests, and devotees. The processual relation between matter and material in early modern Braj also led to the architectural materialization of akasa, or ether, as elemental capaciousness in a subsequent period that saw the loss of Vaishnava subjectivity under the coda   173

hegemonies of British imperialism. The idea of ether, the first element that holds together the network of interactions among the other four elements of air (vayu), fire (tejas), water (apa), and earth (prthivi), as it was elaborated through mid-­nineteenth-­century architecture, invoked an experience of being-­in-­the-­ world. It is the aesthetics of this notion of immanence that could be designated as “geoaesthetics in the land of Krishna.” Even though the climatic epoch of the Little Ice Age had culminated by the 1850s, the phenomenology of geoaesthetics left obdurate traces on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is thus worth sketching out, even if synoptically, the fate of this theophanic praxis of immanence in a period that witnessed the heyday of colonial rule and a concurrent acceleration in anti-­ colonial mobilizations. Consider, for instance, an advertisement for a 1938 film on the life of Krishna in Braj by Keshavrao Dhaiber (figure C.3).7 Released in the very year that Mohandas K. Gandhi organized the annual meeting of the Indian National Congress in Haripura in Gujarat, the Marathi-­Hindi bilingual film made a direct connection between the sacred topographies of Braj and the political terrains of Haripura. While Dhaiber’s earlier films had used allegoric citations to link Braj with the anti-­colonial movement that had by then gained significant momentum, the advertisement for the 1938 film The Son of Nanda (Nandkumar; Nanda was the adoptive father of Krishna) lucidly stated: India’s National Place of Pilgrimage . . . It is Haripura today. It was Gokul in the Golden Age. Gokul was the Haripura of Nand-­Kumar, the King of Kings! Haripura is the Gokul of India’s Leader of Leaders!! You will realise this in Nandkumar. . . . Herds of Cows in Hundreds! Gay Gopis in Thousands!! Gopas mad with God-­Love!! Nandkumar the sweet spectacle of Gokul that was Vithal Nagar. The Haripura of Lord Krishna, The Leader of all Leaders is now at Central Cinema, Bombay.8 A photograph of the actor Anant Vinayak as the young Krishna further underscored the link between Gokul, the town in Braj where Krishna had purportedly grown up, and Vithal Nagar, the site in Haripura where the Indian National Congress meeting was to be held. Widely circulated through newspapers and popular magazines, the advertisement did not merely allude to Braj as a metaphor or an allegory for a space untouched by the crisis of colonial modernity. Rather, Vithal Nagar became the new Braj, India’s “National Place of Pilgrimage.” Gandhian nationalism, in turn, became imbued with Vaishnava conceptions of sacred space that we have encountered in this book. If Vithal Nagar, the township that was to host the annual meeting of the Indian National Congress, was the mythic Gokul where “India’s Leader of Leaders,” Krishna, spent his childhood, the nation-­in-­making was a reflection of this divine presence on earth. From this perspective, Haripura, the site of nationalist politics, could become non-­different from Gokul, the space of Vaishnava sacrality. A geoaesthetics of immanence thus allowed for the conception of a 174 coda

C.3. Advertisement for Nandkumar (1938, dir. Keshavrao Dhaiber). Reproduced from Y. G. Krishnamurti, ed. The 1938 Haripura Congress Souvenir. Photo courtesy Julie Wolf.

space for the nation-­in-­making that was already sovereign. This was, however, only one of the many aesthetics of immanence in operation in the 1930s. Pilgrimage to Braj increased at an unprecedented scale following the development of a new network of roadways built by the colonial government.9 By the 1920s, roadways had become the preferred method of traveling to Braj. Although the 1913 Nagda-­Muttra (Mathura) railway line, built with financial support from the Kachhwaha rulers of Jaipur, had played an important role in the growth of both tourism and pilgrimage in the first two decades of the twentieth century, by the late 1920s and the 1930s, the increase in motor traffic precipitated a sharp decline in rail revenue.10 In 1937, the pilgrimage tax collected in Braj was the highest in north India.11 That the pilgrimage tax collected here was higher than that collected at other equally important pilgrimage centers such as Varanasi, Allahabad, and Haridwar indicates the significance of roadways in making Braj one of the key Hindu pilgrimage sites in this period. To prevent the steady decline in revenue, the Indian State Railways launched an aggressive advertising campaign in 1928, commissioning an internationally renowned French illustrator, Roger Broders (1883–1953), to design a poster promoting travel to Braj (figure C.4). Broders was best known for his distinctive coda   175

art deco travel posters for the Paris-­Lyon-­Méditerranée Railway that promoted tourist destinations such as the beaches of Côte d’Azur and skiing resorts in the French Alps. The French illustrator’s poster for the Indian State Railways, however, depicted the famed Vishram Ghat in Mathura, where Krishna is said to have rested after killing his evil uncle. But the use of English lettering suggests that the campaign was addressed primarily to Western tourists and travelers visiting India. Certainly the soaring domes, graceful red-­sandstone architecture, and pilgrims by the Yamuna in Broders’ poster produced a mise-­en-­scène of seductive Orientalist fantasy whose pictorial genealogies can be traced back to innumerable late nineteenth-­century European and American photographs, stereoviews, and postcards depicting Vishram Ghat (figure C.5). By the late nineteenth century, Vishram Ghat had become the locus of Western tourism, with travel guidebooks recommending a detour to Mathura to Europeans and Americans traveling from Delhi to Agra.12 Having seen an album of photographs of the sacred sites in Braj, George N. Curzon, the Viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905, visited Vishram Ghat in 1899 to personally observe the “picturesque” beauty of the pilgrimage center.13 Functioning well within the genre of colonial photography, views of the site presented a purportedly objective picture of the architecture and pilgrims at the ghat. It is of some significance that these views, for instance the 1899 stereoview by the American photographer Benjamin W. Kilburn reproduced here, was taken from a boat, transforming Vishram Ghat into a space that could clearly be seen, and thus surveyed, by Western tourists. This new practice of seeing as surveying created a singular optical arena that simultaneously mapped ritual architecture, the river, and the colonized subject. This ocular logic of power was, indeed, very different from photographs of Vishram Ghat taken by local studios such as Chunni Lall for pilgrims coming to Braj (see figure 1.4). Taken from the other bank of the Yamuna, the Mathura-­based studio’s “view” of the ghat, for instance, focuses on the early modern sacred architecture on the riverfront without directing the viewer’s gaze to the pilgrims worshiping the river. Color lithographs of the vanayatra (journey through the forests of Braj) depicting the route of the circumambulation of the important sites in Braj were also produced by Indian entrepreneurs to take advantage of a growing market in votive imagery. Vanayatra lithographs were often printed by Mathura-­based establishments.14 But most entrepreneurs opted to have votive lithographs printed at presses in Bombay and Calcutta, where better quality inks and paper could be accessed. The Bombay-­based Bolton Fine Art Litho Works was one such press used by entrepreneurs in the 1930s (figure C.6). The label accompanying the Bolton Fine Art lithograph informs us that the print had been produced for one Anupram Haribhai. Unlike the novel art deco appeal of Broders’ poster, most producers of votive imagery elected to use a traditional visual layout that combined multiple oblique perspectives with a planimetric view in

176 coda

C.4. (Left) Roger Broders, Visit India Muttra, 1928. Color lithograph printed by Lucien Serre, Paris, 100 × 63 cm. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP, Paris. Photo courtesy Poster Photo Archives, Posters Please Inc., NY. C.5. (Below) Benjamin W. Kilburn, Hindu Pilgrims Bathing in the Sacred River of Jumna, Muttra, India, 1899. Albumen print on stereoscopic card, 8.9 × 17.1 cm. Repository: Author’s Collection. Photo courtesy Julie Wolf.

coda   177

C.6. (Right) Pilgrimage Center of Braj (Brij Kshetra), ca. 1930. Color lithograph printed by Bolton Fine Art Litho Press, Bombay, 25.4 × 35.5 cm. Repository: Author’s Collection. Photo courtesy Julie Wolf. C.7. (Below) Shatrunjaya pata, Gujarat, ca. 1750. Opaque watercolor and gold on cotton, 77 × 96 cm. Repository: Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum Collection, 31.746. Photo courtesy Brooklyn Museum of Art.

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the manner of mid-­eighteenth-­century liturgical maps (patas) of Jain pilgrimage towns such as Shatrunjaya in Gujarat (figure C.7).15 Operating as a haptic image—an image one could “touch” with one’s eyes— such pictorial representations functioned as objects of veneration that closely bound the body and the ground. Two distinct approaches to the visualization of space were thus mobilized in tandem. On the one hand, the devotee saw visual representations of temples horizontally at eye level, which allowed for the creation of a focal point for the act of ritually beholding the icon in the temple. The icon of Krishna in a temple in Vishram Ghat, for instance, is carefully demarcated in the lithograph for the viewer to ritually behold. On the other hand, the devotee was presented with an aerial view that imaginatively allowed the viewer to see Braj in its entirety. Consequently, even as the primary pilgrimage sites were rendered realistically, space was simultaneously abstracted into a picture. In part, this act of abstraction situated 1930s vanayatra lithographs within an early modern history of visualizing the topography of the region as a mandala or a schematized representation of the unmanifest world where Krishna plays eternally. Yet unlike earlier liturgical visualizations of the enchanted topos of Braj, 1930s representations demonstrate a remarkable fidelity to transformations in the topography of the region. The artist of the Bolton Fine Art lithograph, for instance, carefully demarcated the early twentieth-­century roadways that were being built concurrently. Thus, while frontal perspective was used to represent the numerous temples and ghats in Braj, the depiction of bridges, pontoons, and the roadways that were being constructed by the colonial government in the 1930s assured a certain planimetric fidelity to the topography of the region.16 By the eighteenth century, pichvais, large-­scale paintings on cloth hung behind icons in Pushtimarg temples, frequently portrayed the sites that were supposed to be visited during the vanayatra or journey through the forests of Braj. Even in the early nineteenth century, such representations of Braj did not depict the roadways that demarcated the route of circumambulation (figure C.8; also see figure 2.19). Neither were the Mughal networks of roadways that ran through Braj from the sixteenth century onward included. Thus, while the key pilgrimage sites, such as Vishram Ghat in Mathura, were carefully rendered in pichvais, space was abstracted into a picture that could provide the devotee a visual tool to imagine the ritualistic act of traveling through the unmapped, unenumerated sacred groves of Braj. Why, then, were colonial roadways, indicative of British “presence on the Indian landscape,”17 suddenly introduced in visual representations of Braj, especially when the sacred topos of the region was perceived as non-­different from the body of Krishna? As a network of power internal to the nineteenth-­ century imperial economy, roadways were symptomatic of the production of colonial “state space” in South Asia.18 The British began extending the coda   179

C.8. Pichvai for circumambulation of Braj, Nathdwara, ca. 1830. Opaque watercolor, gold, and silver on cotton, 279.5 × 255.5 cm. Repository: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Purchased 2005, NGA 2005.354. Photo courtesy National Gallery of Australia.

preexisting network of Mughal roadways in the 1780s, and by the 1840s, metaled roads had been built by the colonial government across the entire subcontinent. Not only did these roads allow for easy movement of the British army, they also made possible the economic growth and consolidation of the British empire through the flow of commodities across the vast spaces of the 180 coda

C.9. The temple of Shrinathji, Nathdwara, ca. 1870. Opaque watercolor on paper, 67.5 × 50.3 cm. Repository: Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore, Purchased with funds from Nitin Doshi, 2000-05637. Photo courtesy Asian Civilisations Museum.

subcontinent. The introduction of colonial roadways in Braj in the early twentieth century thus transformed the space of enchantment into a “space constituted by technics.”19 It is in the representation of the technics of modern governance that the Bolton Fine Art lithograph departed from earlier paintings of Braj such as the ca. 1830 pichvai reproduced here. The introduction of roadways in representations of Braj does not, however, suggest a thoroughgoing transformation in pictorial imaginings of space in South Asia more broadly. Historians of early modern cartography have documented numerous maps, both religious and administrative, that consistently and accurately marked roads, irrigation canals, property, and even travel routes for pilgrims.20 In the pilgrimage center of Nathdwara, artists, for instance, painted maps of the town that clearly demarcated the roads leading to important temples such as Shrinathji (figure C.9). Pilgrimage towns like Nathdwara were centered on the preeminence of particular temples, and hence the representation of roads leading to specific temples were perhaps deemed important. Braj, in contrast, was almost inevitably represented either as a mandala or as the site of Krishna’s miraculous deeds. Extant topographic representations of coda   181

the region, for instance the ca. 1830 pichvai of Braj, thus entirely omit already existing Mughal roadways in the region that connected the pilgrimage site to Delhi and Agra (see figure C.8). This omission was perhaps mediated by theological conceptions of Braj as an embodied being. Govardhan, after all, had started bleeding when workers attempted to dislodge stone from its body. The planimetric fidelity discernable in the Bolton Fine Art lithograph did not, however, displace such prior imaginaries of land. Recent scholarship provides us with a frame to better comprehend the array of practices that revolved around the making of space—both real and metaphoric—in late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century Braj. Moving against the overt emphasis in earlier scholarship on imperial interventions in the making of a culture of spatiality in colonial South Asia, the historian Sumathi Ramasawamy, for instance, employs the idea of “barefoot cartography” to demonstrate how early twentieth-­century visual culture disrupted the cold gaze of colonial cartography by valorizing the map as devotional, anthropomorphic, and even maternal.21 Likewise, in Braj, the otherworldly and the worldly were combined to conjunct, through representation, real space in north India with the unmanifest world where Krishna sports eternally. This distinguished early twentieth-­century lithographs of the vanayatra from colonial cartographic projects that reduced space to a homogenous, empty, Cartesian grid.22 The continuing valence of earlier philosophies of geoaesthetics, not merely as nostalgia for unspoiled nature but as a distinctive artistic schema for representing the celestial and the terrestrial, allowed for a relinking of human action and embodied space in early twentieth-­century Braj. Indeed, theological systems that acknowledged the magical, the mythological, the sacred, and the cognitive as an undifferentiated play between the manifest and the unmanifest, between Braj in colonial India and Braj as the eternal abode of Krishna, may have activated particular kinds of imaginative artistic strategies whereby Radha and Krishna could seamlessly cohabit with a topee-­wearing European tourist taking a pleasure ride in the Yamuna near Vishram Ghat in Mathura in the Bolton lithograph. That the khaki-­clad sahib was depicted near the famed Vishram Ghat is surely not a coincidence. The 1924 edition of John Murray’s celebrated A Handbook for Travellers in India, Burma and Ceylon confirms: “The Arati ceremony, or worship of the sacred river, takes place about dusk at the Vishant [Vishram] Ghat, when cows, monkeys and turtles are fed. The most convenient way of seeing the ceremony is to take a boat.”23 The 1899 stereoview of Vishram Ghat by Kilburn was also taken from a boat in the river. For Western tourists, it was Vishram Ghat that had become the object of the gaze, and the Yamuna, ecstatic love in liquid form, the viewing field from which seductive fantasies of India and Hinduism could be observed. For the unnamed artist of the Bolton Fine Art lithograph, a resolution to the representational dilemma of modernity may have also been located in the momentary coalescence of time and space that materialized through the 182 coda

determined layering of the numinous and the colonial. A new cartography of immanence was thus created, and with this, a new space invented yet again. For Vaishnava practitioners, this new space may well have surpassed the state space of the British empire, the space of order, reason, and logic, the space of scientists, urban planners, and engineers, to become the space of lived experiences, space invested with symbolism and magic. It is in the heteroglossic speech-­act of remaking colonial state space that votive lithographs also departed from precolonial paintings of Braj.24 The depiction of roadways was central to this new representational logic, especially given the emphasis on circumambulating Braj as an intrinsic component of Vaishnava pilgrimage. While it is difficult to determine with certainty the precise historical juncture at which roadways entered liturgical representations of Braj, a pilgrimage guidebook published in 1873 in Mathura included a modern map of the region. Claiming to be an account of the circumambulation of Braj undertaken by Vallabha’s son in 1543, the 1873 text had as its frontispiece a woodblock print of a modern map of Braj with roads demarcated with dotted lines (figure C.10).25 Although not used in the same way as votive lithographs, the 1873 map might have prefigured a fundamental transformation in visualizing Braj. The label naksha caurasi kos ki parikrama, a map of the eighty-­four kos (approximately 160-­mile) circumambulation route, clearly asserts that this is a naksha, the Persianate word used in Mughal court administration to describe city plans, navigational charts, and route maps. The incorporation of the modern roadway system within devotional cartographies suggests an epistemological shift from the metaphysical image of space to the map as a representation of territory. The transference of roadways from maps in vernacular guidebooks to votive prints might have also transpired at some point in the early twentieth century, for there are no extant pre-­1930 lithographs of Braj that depict roadways. Nonetheless, in the 1930s, the tactical appropriation of colonial technology allowed for the materialization of a new geoaesthetics that disrupted the ideological fixedness of colonial state space. The aesthetic vectors of the 1930s lithograph appear to have extended well into the 1950s, when the father of the current priest of Ramachandra Temple in Jaipur went on a pilgrimage to Braj. Like most devotees, he acquired a lithograph depicting the sacred sites of Braj from the bazaars of Mathura. Subsequently, the print was framed and hung in his temple in Jaipur. It is this print that is worshiped in the temple. As the priest runs his finger over the roadways depicted in the lithograph every evening, he affectively circumambulates the pilgrimage site of Braj. Prints from the 1930s certainly provided the template for the lithograph that the priest had acquired. The roadways included in the 1950s lithograph correspond almost precisely with 1930s iterations, such as the one issued by the Bombay-­based Bolton Fine Art Litho Works (see figure C.1). The topee-­wearing European tourist by Vishram Ghat, though, had now been replaced by an Indian family enjoying a boat ride on the river Yamuna. coda   183

C.10. Map of Circumambulatory Route of Braj (Naksha Caurasi kos ki Parikrama). Reproduced from Gokulnath (attr.), Vanja¯tra¯ Braj Caura¯sı¯, 2.

Indeed, by the 1950s and the 1960s, the pilgrimage center had been incorporated into all-­India tours that took tourists to pilgrimage sites such as Braj but also to metropolitan destinations like New Delhi and Bombay. Some tours even featured trips to post-­Independence hydroelectric project sites such as the Bhakra-­Nangal multipurpose dam in Punjab, as the geographer David E. Sopher wrote in a 1966 study on popular Hindu pilgrimage circuits. As Sopher noted, “ ‘Have darshan [behold] of the new India!’ was the appeal made by one 1960s handbill.”26 Perhaps the father of the current priest of Ramachandra Temple had acquired his print on one such tour that took him not only to Braj but also to the fabled sites of Bombay, Delhi, and Bhakra-­Nangal.

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C.11. Sheba Chhachhi, The Water Diviner, 2008. Installation with video, books, lightboxes, and sound, dimensions variable. Repository: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, Edition 1. Photo courtesy Sheba Chhachhi.

The story of Braj, then, resists closure. It demands dexterous epistemological shifts to adequately account for multivalent narratives of geoaesthetics. Acknowledged by the government of India’s Central Pollution Control Board in the 2000s as the most polluted river in India, the Yamuna that traverses the pilgrimage site is now deemed fit only for irrigation and industrial cooling, ruling out the possibility of either human consumption or aquatic life.27 As the river flows through the industrial belts of Delhi, Ghaziabad, Noida, and Faridabad, untreated domestic and industrial effluents are discharged into the water, converting the Yamuna into a river of death.28 It is this absented river—heavy with toxic effluents and swathed with buoyant plastic debris—that appears in the contemporary artist Sheba Chhachhi’s 2008 installation The Water Diviner (figure C.11). Chhachhi’s installation is part of a larger ecological impulse in recent art practices that “bears the potential to both rethink politics and politicize art’s relation to ecology,” in the words of the art historian T. J. Demos.29

coda   185

C.12. Sheba Chhachhi, The Water Diviner, 2008. Lightbox, 35.6 × 55.9 × 12.7 cm. Repository: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, Edition 1. Photo courtesy Sheba Chhachhi.

The geoaesthetics of the Little Ice Age was certainly no less political in its shaping of a planetary consciousness. Seeping into The Water Diviner via a lightbox transparency of a manuscript painting of Radha and her female companions immersed in the river Yamuna in Braj—a painting not dissimilar in concept to the sixteenth-­century Isarda Bhāgavata Purāṇa folio with which we began— planetary geoaesthetics spills into our embattled present as trace, memory, and refraction (figure C.12).

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Notes

Introduction: Climate Change and Art History 1 Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule, appendix 3. 2 Acuna-­Soto et al., “Megadrought and Megadeath in 16th century Mexico”; and Marr and Kiracofe, “Was the Huey Cocoliztli a Haemorrhagic Fever?” 3 European accounts of the epidemic include Hinojosos, Summa y recopilación de chirurgia. For Nahua accounts, see Diel, The Tira de Tepechpan. 4 Lehmann and Kutscher, Geschichte der Azteken. 5 Grove, Little Ice Ages, vol. 2, 633. 6 Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 112–22. 7 For instance, Grove and Chappell, “El Niño Chronology.” 8 The Abbasids ruled between 750 and 1258 CE. Tracing their lineage to al-­῾Abbas, the uncle of the Prophet Muhammad, the Abbasids became a powerful dynasty after defeating the Umayyads in 750 CE. Al-­Mutawakkil ‘Ala Allah was the tenth Abbasid caliph. For a discussion on the Millennial History, see Leach, Indian Miniature Paintings and Drawings, 53–58. 9 For Akbar’s millennialism, see Moin, The Millennial Sovereign, 133. 10 Another folio from the manuscript in the collection of the British Museum, London (Accession Number: 1934,0113,0.1) depicts the demolition of the shrine of Imam Husayn in Karbala under the orders of al-­Mutawakkil. For al-­Mutawakkil’s religious policy, see Melchert, “Religious Policies of the Caliphs.” 11 For Akbar’s philosophy of sulh-­i kull, see Blake, Time in Early Modern Islam, 33–34. 12 Although the Millennial History was supposed to be completed by 1592, revisions were still being made in 1594–95. See Guy and Britschgi, Wonder of the Age, 205. 13 Abu’l-­Fazl, Akbarnāma, vol. 3, 1063–64. 14 Abu’l-­Fazl, Akbarnāma, vol. 3, 1064. 15 Banarsidas, Ardhakāthanaka, 231. 16 For sixteenth-­century texts describing the droughts, see Habib, The Agrarian System, 114. 17 Abu’l-­Fazl, Akbarnāma, vol. 2, 56–57. 18 Monserrate, The Commentary of Father Monserrate, 31. 19 Habib, The Agrarian System, 115–20. 20 Grove and Adamson, “El Niño Chronology,” 58. 21 Glacial expansion had led to a fall in the mean annual temperatures in Europe by 0.6°C (1.1°F) in relation to the average temperature between 1000 and 2000 CE. See Grove, Little Ice Ages, vol. 2; Lamb, Climate, vol. 2.

187

22 Grove, Little Ice Ages, vol. 2, 633–34. 23 See Allison, The Love There That’s Sleeping for Harrison’s engagement with Braj’s liturgy. 24 Chadwick, “Geography of Heaven.” 25 I use the terms Hinduism and Vaishnavism interchangeably throughout the book to refer to the practices that should be properly described as Vaishnava. There is much debate about whether the term Hinduism is a colonial construction. But as early as 1776, Nathaniel B. Halhed, an officer in the East India Company, suggested that the term “Hindoo” was a defining category of self-­imagining consciously articulated in opposition to a Muslim presence in the subcontinent (Halhed, A Code of Gentoo laws, xxii). In the more recent past, scholars such as David N. Lorenzen have argued that by the sixteenth century, Hinduness as a conceptual category was already articulated in opposition to its mleccha (foreigner, non-­Aryan, outcaste) Other. Hinduism as a political strategy was thus well in place before the coming of colonial modernity. See Lorenzen “Who Invented Hinduism?” for a history of precolonial articulations of Hinduism. 26 See Hawley, At Play with Krishna; Haberman, Acting as a Way of Salvation; and Holdrege, Bhakti and Embodiment. 27 For recent engagements with the specific theological configurations that have shaped pilgrimage practices in diverse sites, see Lutgendorf, “Imagining Ayodhyā”; Feldhaus, Connected Places; Maclean, Pilgrimage and Power; and Eck, India. 28 Faxian, A Record of the Buddhist Countries, 85. 29 For the history of Braj in the early centuries of the Common Era, see Srinivasan, “Early Kṛishṇa Icons”; and Entwistle, Braj. 30 Cunningham, Report of a Tour in Eastern Rajputana, vol. 20, 43–46. For Chaurasi Khambha Mosque at Kaman, see Flood, Objects of Translation, chapter 5. 31 Krishnadasa Kaviraja’s hagiographic biography written in the early seventeenth century serves as the primary source for scholarship on Chaitanya (Kaviraja, Caitanya Caritāmṛta). 32 For the history of the transformations in Krishna worship, see Bhandarkar, Vaiṣṇavism; Colas, “History of Vaiṣṇava Traditions”; and Srinivasan, “Early Kṛishṇa Icons.” 33 For the history and historiography of bhakti, see Hawley, A Storm of Songs. 34 The most influential work in this body of literature was Jayadeva’s The Songs of Govinda (Gītagovinda), composed in the latter half of the twelfth century in Bengal. For the history of Vaishnavism in Bengal, see Chakravarti, Vaiṣṇavism in Bengal. 35 Hardy, Viraha-­Bhakti, 36. 36 O’Connell, “Social Implications of the Gaud iya Vaiṣṇava Movement.” 37 Chaitanya’s direct disciple and Braj-­based theologian Rupa Goswami’s The Ocean of the Essence of Devotional Rasa (Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu; 1541) explains this well. The text emphasizes ritualistic service (seva) through scriptural injunctions (vaidhi bhakti sadhana) as the first step toward an ideal devotional practice, that is, a practice of devotion through emotional sublimation (raganuga bhakti sadhana). Goswami, Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu. 38 The name Gaudiya Vaishnavism derives from the region of Gauda (Bengal) where most of Chaitanya’s devotees came from. 39 Entwistle, Braj, 298. 40 Entwistle, Braj, 275.

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41 Entwistle, Braj, 60. 42 Bhatt, Vrajabhaktivilāsa. 43 For the Pushtimarg version of the narrative, see Barz, The Bhakti Sect; and Bennett, The Path of Grace. A different version of the narrative is presented in Gaudiya sources. 44 Monserrate, The Commentary of Father Monserrate, 90. 45 For this history, see Entwistle, Braj. 46 For medieval sculpture found in Braj, see Agrawala, “Catalogue of the Mathura Museum.” The economic and political development of the Mathura-­Agra region in the early sixteenth century is discussed in Trivedi, “The Emergence of Agra.” 47 Monserrate, The Commentary of Father Monserrate, 93. 48 While the Gaudiyas believed in the simultaneity of difference and non-­difference between the supreme god and his creation (achintya bheda abheda), the Pushtimargis based their practice on the philosophy of non-­dualism, or suddhadvaita. In contrast, the Nimbarka sect expounded sole devotion to both Radha and Krishna, who, worshipped together, constituted the absolute truth. For the Nimbarka sect, see Clémentin-­Ojha, “La Renaissance du Nimbārka Sampradāya.” Other contemporaneous Vaishnava sects active in Braj included the Radhavallabhs, the Haridasis, and the Ramanujas. 49 For instance, according to the Caitanya Caritāmṛta, the trees of Vrindavan “rained tears of honey . . . as when a friend meets a friend” on seeing the mystic. Chaitanya, in turn, “played with them all, controlled by them.” Kaviraja, Caitanya Caritāmṛta, 2.17.190–94. 50 Matthes, “Report of Committee on Glaciers, April 1939.” 51 See Lamb, Climate, 104. 52 Bradley and Jones, “ ‘Little Ice Age.’ ” 53 See, for instance, Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine; and Utterström, “Climatic Fluctuations and Population Problems.” 54 Braudel, La Méditerranée. Recent studies include White, The Climate of Rebellion; Parker, Global Crisis; and Degroot, The Frigid Golden Age. 55 Mann, “Little Ice Age,” 504. 56 See, for instance, Richards, The Unending Frontier. For a survey of the field, see McNeill, “The State of the Field of Environmental History.” 57 See Quinn and Neal, “The Historical Record of El Niño Events”; and Diaz and Markgraf, El Niño. 58 Quinn, Neal, and de Mayolo, “El Niño Occurrences.” For a more recent analysis, see Ortlieb, “The Documented Historical Record of El Niño Events in Peru.” 59 Grove and Chappell, “El Niño Chronology,” 14. 60 Banarasidas, Ardhakāthanaka, 231. 61 Bjerknes, “Atmospheric Teleconnections.” 62 Grove and Chappell, “El Niño Chronology,” 23. 63 Lamb, Climate, History and the Modern World, 227. 64 Fagan, The Little Ice Age; White, The Climate of Rebellion; Parker, Global Crisis; and Degroot, The Frigid Golden Age. 65 Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, 19. Cited in Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art, 37. 66 For the environmental determinism of eighteenth-­century European art history, see Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art, 36–38.

note s to intr oduc tion   189

67 As the historian David Arnold writes, “Environments as we have seen were widely believed to have a determining influence upon cultures: savagery, like civilization, was linked to certain climatic or geographical features” (The Problem of Nature, 141–42). 68 Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena; and Kubler, The Shape of Time, chapter 1. 69 Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History”; Bennett, Vibrant Matter. 70 Zalasiewicz et al., “Are we now living in the Anthropocene?” 71 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, x. 72 While scholars have debated the precise beginning of the Anthropocene, it is now accepted that James Watt’s design of the steam engine in 1784 was the crucial tipping point. This argument was first made by the Nobel-­laureate chemist Paul J. Crutzen and a marine science specialist, Eugene F. Stoermer. For a recent analysis, see Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene. 73 Braddock, “From Nature to Ecology,” 453. See, for instance, Nisbet, Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems; and Demos, Decolonizing Nature. 74 For instance, Thomas, Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-­Century France; Dunaway, Natural Visions; and Mirzoeff, “Visualizing the Anthropocene.” 75 Mirzoeff, “Visualizing the Anthropocene,” 213. 76 See Dixit, Hodell, and Petrie, “Abrupt Weakening of the Summer Monsoon,” for the findings of a recent collaborative research project conducted by the Department of Earth Sciences and the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge. Also see Lahiri, The Decline and Fall of the Indus Civilization. 77 See Kaimal, “Playful Ambiguity,” for a history of Mamallapuram. 78 Coomaraswamy, The Transformation of Nature in Art, 24. 79 Kramrisch, Indian Sculpture, 55. 80 Gary Shapiro, “Territory, Landscape, Garden,” 113. 81 Conferences include the biennial Geo-­Aesthetics Conference initiated by the Inter­ national Association for the Study of Environment, Space, and Place in 2008. Contemporary art exhibitions include GEO-­AESTHETICS, Museum for Contemporary Art, Citadelpark, Ghent (2013). For a recent collection of essays on geoaesthetics in contemporary art, literature, and cinema, see Elias and Moraru, The Planetary Turn. 82 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 95.

One | Water Epigraph: Bhatt, Haribhaktivilāsa, vol. 2, 328. Early versions of this chapter were published as Ray, “Hydroaesthetics in the Little Ice Age”; and Ray, “Ecomoral Aesthetics at Vishram Ghat, Mathura.” 1 Written in south India in the late ninth or early tenth century CE, book 10 of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa describes Krishna’s early life and his divine play (lila) with the cowherd women (gopis) of Braj. See Gupta and Valpey, The Bhāgavata Purāṇa. 2 Bhāgavata Purāṇa, book 10, 141. 3 See Chandra and Ehnbom, The Cleveland Tuti-­Nama Manuscript; Lerner, The Flame and the Lotus; Kossak, Indian Court Painting; and Mason, Intimate Worlds. 4 As Karl Khandalavala and Jagdish Mittal write, “We feel that by the time the new [Isarda] Bhāgavata was executed at least some painters of the Delhi-­Agra region working in the Pre-­Mughal Hindu tradition had achieved, maybe due to contact

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with the early Mughal painters, greater technical dexterity than their predecessors” (Khandalavala and Mittal, “The Bhagavata MSS,” 30). 5 See, for instance, a folio depicting Krishna stealing the clothes of the bathing cowherd women in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Accession Number: 1972.260). 6 For recent engagements, see Subrahmanyam, Explorations in Connected History; and Um, The Merchant Houses of Mocha. 7 Jain-­Neubauer, The Stepwells of Gujarat, and more recently, Hegewald, Water Architecture in South Asia, have drawn attention to the typologies of water architecture in South Asia. In The Archaeology of Hindu Ritual, Willis focuses on ritualism and water management at a specific archaeological site in central India. Blair and Bloom, Rivers of Paradise, focus on the visual culture of water in diverse parts of the Islamic world. In comparison, there is a significant body of scholarship on European hydrocultures. See, for instance, Mukerji, Impossible Engineering; and Rinne, The Waters of Rome. 8 For a discussion on pigments and watercolor, see Eaton, Colour, Art and Empire. For a recent survey on water in modern and contemporary art, see Clarke, Water and Art. 9 For the history of the manuscript, see Ghani, A History of Persian Language, 78–80. The use of spectacles in sixteenth-­century India is discussed in Khan, “Medieval Theories of Vision”; and Chakravarti and Chakravarti, Painted Spectacles. 10 Goswami, Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu, 407. 11 For the philosophical reformulation of rasa in sixteenth-­century Braj, see Holdrege, Bhakti and Embodiment, 86–91. 12 Martin, “Rajasthan,” 250. 13 Holdrege, Bhakti and Embodiment, 96. 14 Lamb, Climate, vol. 2, 104 15 White, “Climate Change,” 401. 16 McNeill, “Envisioning an Ecological Atlantic,” 23. 17 Habib, The Agrarian System, 115. 18 Mundy, The Travels of Peter Mundy, 44. 19 Folios survive in public and private collections, including the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Alvin O. Bellak collection (now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art), the Goenka collection in Kolkata, the Gopi K. Kanoria collection in Patna, the Kronos collection in New York, and the Paul F. Walter collection in New York. 20 The sixteenth-­century Glories of Mathura (Mathurā Māhātmya), attributed to Rupa Goswami, refers to a sculpture of Surya being worshipped beside the Yamuna at Mathura, possibly in the vicinity of Vishram Ghat. Goswami (attr.), Mathurā Māhātmya, 87. For the history of the text, see Entwistle, “Māhātmya Sources on the Pilgrimage Circuit of Mathurā.” 21 Goswami (attr.), Mathurā Māhātmya, 83. 22 For instance, Hariray, Account of the Manifestation of Shrinathji (Śrīnāthjī kī Prākaṭya Vārtā; late seventeenth century). For other versions of the narrative, see Entwistle, Braj, 135. 23 In the early decades of the sixteenth century, the two major routes for the transport of goods between Bengal and the coast of Gujarat was through Mathura by both river and land and by the Kalpi-­Erachh-­Chanderi route. Trivedi, “The Emergence of Agra,” 162.

note s to chap ter one   191

24 Kaviraja, Caitanya Caritāmṛta, especially the Madhya līlā. 25 Bhāgavata Purāṇa, 201. 26 Roy, The History of Jaipur City, 227. 27 The ca. 1570 Haridev Temple in Govardhan was sponsored by Bhagwantdas. 28 For the history of the studio, see Gutman, Through Indian Eyes. 29 Roy, The History of Jaipur City, 227. 30 See Bühnemann, Maṇḍalas and Yantras. 31 Entwistle, Braj, 51. Similar diagrams are also seen in contemporaneous Mughal architecture. A number of structures patronized by Akbar in Fatehpur Sikri are embellished with six-­pointed stars that scholars suggest might have had a talismanic function (Nath, History of Mughal Architecture, vol. 1, 147). 32 For twentieth-­century representations, see Stewart, “Replicating Vaiṣṇava Worlds.” 33 Sectarian accounts indicate that Chaitanya collected these texts during his pilgrimage to south India, prior to his arrival in Braj. Dimock, Place of the Hidden Moon, 220. 34 Asher, The Architecture of Mughal India, 62. Also see Eck, Darśan. 35 For Akbar’s architecture, see Asher, The Architecture of Mughal India; Koch, Mughal Architecture; and Nath, History of Mughal Architecture, vol. 2. 36 For the history of the Palam Bhāgavata, see Ehnbom, “An Analysis and Reconstruction of the Dispersed Bhāgavata Purāṇa.” 37 For instance, a 1516 illustrated manuscript of the Āraṇyaka Parvan of the Mahābhārata produced in Agra in the collection of the Asiatic Society, Bombay. See Khandalavala and Chandra, An Illustrated Āraṇyaka Parvan. 38 Guy and Britschgi, Wonder of the Age; and Topsfield, In the Realm of Gods and King. 39 Bhāgavata Purāṇa, book 10, 141. 40 For contending views, see Vaudeville, “The Cowherd God in Ancient India.” 41 See Gadon, “An Iconographical Analysis of the Balagopalastuti.” 42 For the history of the manuscript, see Seyller, The Adventures of Hamza. 43 Haberman, River of Love, 203. 44 Haberman, River of Love, 107. 45 Haberman, River of Love, 105. 46 Habib, The Agrarian System, 113. 47 Abu’l-­Fazl, Akbarnāma, vol. 2, 56–57. 48 Bada’uni, Muntakhab al-­tawārīkh, 550. 49 Abu’l-­Fazl, Ā’īn-­i Akbarī, vol. 3, 426. 50 The transversal relationality that connects diverse ecologies is discussed in Guattari, The Three Ecologies. 51 Habib, The Agrarian System, 115–22. 52 Jahangir, Jahāngīrnāma, 196–97. This was the first instance of the bubonic plague in South Asia. See Bala, Medicine and Medical Policies in India for a history of the plague. 53 “Joseph Salbank at Agra to the East India Company in London,” East India Company: General Correspondence 1602–1859, Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London, IOR/E/3/5 ff 196–97, November 22, 1617. 54 Bala, Medicine and Medical Policies, 27. 55 Asher, The Architecture of Mughal India, 118. 56 Jahangir, Jahāngīrnāma, 162. An ell is approximately eighteen inches, representing the length of a man’s arm from elbow to middle finger. 57 Kolff, Naukar, Rajput & Sepoy, 130.

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58 Dhar, The Toraṇa in Indian and Southeast Asian Architecture, 1. 59 The parergon, Jacques Derrida notes, is “not incidental; it is connected to and cooperates in its operation from the outside” (Derrida, “The Parergon,” 20). 60 Alberti, On Painting. For a critical reading of Alberti, see Heninger, The Subtext of Form in the English Renaissance, chapter 5. 61 Derrida, “The Parergon,” 18. For art historical engagements with the frame, see essays in Duro, The Rhetoric of the Frame. 62 Bhoja (attr.), Samarāṅganasūtradhāra, chapter 46. Attributed to the Paramara ruler Bhoja (ca. 1000–1055 CE), the text in its current form was compiled in the fourteenth or the fifteenth century. The title is often translated as The Stage Manager [sūtradhāra] of Battlefields [samarāṅgana], Architect of Human Dwellings, or Architect of the Fortunes on the Battlefield. For the history of the text, see Salvini, “The Samarāṅganasūtradhāra.” 63 Inscriptional records suggest that this practice had become popular by the tenth century across South Asia although references to the ceremony can be found sporadically in post-­seventh-­century epigraphy. See Schmiedchen, “The Ceremony of Tulāpuruṣa.” 64 Khan, Shāhjahānnāma, 28. Also see Blake, Time in Early Modern Islam, 93–94. 65 While scholars are still unsure about the function of this particular structure, it is generally assumed that the kiosk, popularly known as the Astrologer’s Seat, served as a space for Akbar to consult mystics and astrologers. See Brand and Lowry, Fatehpur-­Sikri, 190. Monserrate, however, notes that the emperor publicly distributed copper coins from the palace courtyard, suggesting that the kiosk was indeed used for the charitable distribution of wealth. Monserrate, The Commentary of Father Monserrate, 208. 66 See, for instance, a 1615 painting attributed to Manohar in the collection of the British Museum, London (Accession Number: 1948,1009,0.69) depicting Jahangir weighing his son. 67 See Dhar, The Toraṇa in Indian and Southeast Asian Architecture, for torana typologies. 68 Artisans trained in Gujarat worked on Shaikh Salim’s 1580–81 tomb in Fatehpur Sikri. Asher, The Architecture of Mughal India, 56. 69 For the history of the motif, see Ranasinghe, “The Evolution and Significance of the Makara Torana.” 70 Bhatt, Haribhaktivilāsa, vol. 2, 328. 71 For the history of Bir Singh Dev’s architecture patronage, see Rothfarb, Orchha and Beyond. 72 Cited in Rothfarb, Orchha and Beyond, 41. For the history of the text, see Busch, Poetry of Kings, 46–54. 73 Tieffenthaler, Des Pater Joseph Tieffenthaler’s Historisch-­geographische, 143. 74 Roy, The History of Jaipur City, 228–29. 75 Atmaram, Savāī Jayasiṃha Carita, 697–701. 76 For the patronage of Man Singh I, see Asher, “The Architecture of Raja Man Singh.” 77 The Maharaja of Banaras’ construction is recorded in an inscription at Vishram Ghat. 78 Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 59. 79 See, for instance, Wagoner, “ ‘Sultan among Hindu Kings’ ”; Asher, “The Architecture of Raja Man Singh”; and Flood, Objects of Translation.

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80 Bhandari, Khulāsat al-­Tawārīkh, 34. 81 See, for instance, Sarkar, History of Aurangzib; and Growse, Mathurá, among others. 82 Bilgrami, Ḥadīqatu’l Aqālīm, 170. 83 Guattari, The Three Ecologies, 43. 84 Ingold, Lines, 103.

Two | Land Epigraph: Viṣṇu Purāṇa, 525. 1 Viṣṇu Purāṇa, 524. 2 Harivaṃśa, 298–302. For a history of the text, see Ingalls, “The Harivaṃśa as a Mahākāvya.” 3 Viṣṇu Purāṇa, 526. 4 The turning away from Indra in this period has been read by scholars as a move toward the worship of god as a corporeal entity. For this history, see Hein, “A Revolution in Kṛṣṇaism.” For Govardhan myth, see Vaudeville, “The Govardhan Myth”; and Hawley, “Krishna’s Cosmic Victories.” 5 See, for example, Isacco, Krishna The Divine Lover; Srinivasan, “Early Kṛishṇa Icons”; Bhattacharya, Krishna-­Cult in Indian Art; and Parimoo, Essays on New Art History. 6 Fifth-­and sixth-­century sculptures of Krishna lifting Govardhan hill have been discovered in Rangmahal, Kara, Deogarh, and Varanasi, among other sites. 7 For early sculpture from the region, see Vogel, Catalogue of the Archaeological Museum. 8 See Jaiswal, The Origin and Development of Vaiṣṇavism. 9 Gonda, “Ancient Indian Kingship,” 40. 10 In a 2007 essay, Tim Ingold provocatively argued that material culture studies should focus more on “the properties of materials” than on “the materiality of objects” (“Materials against Materiality,” 1). A number of respondents to Ingold’s essay suggested that an approach that pays equal attention to material and materiality might allow us to comprehend why certain stones are considered valuable beyond their physical properties. See especially Tilley, “Materiality in Materials.” My discussion on material and materiality is informed by the ongoing debate over this question. 11 Uddin and Iqbaluddin, “Migration of Yamuna River”; and Uddin, “Land System Studies Using Statistical Image Analysis Techniques.” 12 For instance, the village of Jamunavatau situated half a mile east of Govardhan. Vaudeville, “The Govardhan Myth,” 10. 13 Eliade, Traité d’histoire des religions. 14 Durkheim, Les formes élémentaires. For a comprehensive historiography, see Knott, The Location Of Religion. 15 Merleau-­Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception; Tuan, Space and Place; and Smith, Map Is Not Territory. 16 Scholarly writing on the history of landscape is vast. Seminal texts in this historiography include Clark, Landscape into Art; Gombrich, “Renaissance Artistic Theory”; and Alpers, The Art of Describing. Recent critical rethinking of the landscape includes Mitchell, Landscape and Power; and Schama, Landscape and Memory. Engagement with the idea of the landscape in the art history of South Asia has for the most part been limited to colonialism and the picturing of the British empire.

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See, for instance, Tillotson, The Artificial Empire; and Almeida and Gilpin, Indian Renaissance. 17 Ingold, Being Alive, 126–27. 18 With the publication of Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, new materialism has emerged as a conceptual paradigm that takes the agential nature of matter seriously. Much of the scholarly engagement with new materialism, however, is limited to the field of contemporary art, cinema, and visual culture. See, for instance, Barrett and Bolt, Carnal Knowledge; and Ellsworth and Kruse, Making the Geologic Now. 19 For the geological formation of Govardhan ridge, see Heron, The Geology of North-­ Eastern Rajputana and Adjacent Districts; and Sinha, Progress Report on Systematic Geohydrological Investigations. 20 Hariray’s seventeenth-­century Śrīnāthjī kī Prākaṭya Vārtā recounts the history of the icon from its discovery in Govardhan until the establishment of a temple in Nathdwara, Rajasthan. 21 Vaudeville, “The Govardhan Myth,” 19. 22 According to Govind Lal Goswami of the temple of Shrinathji, the color of the stele has changed from its natural reddish hue to opaque black from repeated application of sacred pastes over centuries. Cited in Talwar and Krishna, Indian Pigment Painting on Cloth, 129. 23 The Harivaṃsá suggests that Krishna, as a hill deity, manifests from within or underneath the ridge. Vaudeville, “The Govardhan Myth,” 5. 24 Coomaraswamy, Catalogue of the Indian Collections; Skelton, Rājasthānī Temple Hangings; Talwar and Krishna, Indian Pigment Painting; and Ambalal, Krishna as Shrinathji. 25 Reproduced in Coomaraswamy, Catalogue of the Indian Collections, vol. 5, 145–46. 26 Skelton, Rājasthānī Temple Hangings, 82. 27 A Rajasthani provenance for the icon is further corroborated by the fact that Shrinathji migrated from Govardhan in Braj to Nathdwara, two hundred miles north of Arthuna, in contemporary Rajasthan in 1672. According to hagiography, Shrinathji, along with the other important icons in Braj, moved to western India allegedly to escape the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb’s iconoclasm. This seventeenth-­century exodus had very little to do with Aurangzeb’s purported iconoclasm. Rather, it was a result of intricate maneuvers by various western Indian kingdoms to claim legitimacy by persuading the icons from Braj to reside in their kingdoms. See Ray, “In the Name of Krishna.” 28 See Barz, The Bhakti Sect; and Mital, Braj ke Dharma-­Sampradāyo. 29 Entwistle, Braj, 137–38. For Madhavendra Puri’s career, see Hardy, “Mādhavêndra Purī.” 30 Asad, Formations of the Secular, 45. 31 See Hariray, Śrīnāthjī kī Prākaṭya Vārtā. For Gaudiya narratives, see De, Early History of the Vaisnava Faith, 97–99. 32 Kaviraja, Caitanya Caritāmṛta, 2.18.19. 33 Tuan, Topophilia, 4. 34 See Lynch, “Pilgrimage with Krishna”; Vaudeville, Myths, Saints and Legends; and Toomey, Food from the Mouth of Krishna. 35 Vaudeville, “Braj, Lost and Found.” 36 Kaul, “Early Mathurā.” 37 Vaudeville, “Braj, Lost and Found,” 212–13.

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38 Sectarian literature provides contradictory dates for the precise year the Gaudiyas were ousted from Govardhan. Based on sectarian literature, Mital suggests 1533 or 1571. Mital, Braj ke Dharma-­Sampradāyo, 251. However, a seventeenth-­century narrative by Krishnadas mentions Akbar’s intercessions in Braj immediately after the Gaudiya encampment was set on fire. Scholars agree that the disagreement over the control of Govardhan occurred in the 1570s, during the early years of Akbar’s reign. Krishnadas’ narrative is reproduced in Barz, The Bhakti Sect, 207–56. For a recent appraisal, see Hawley, A Storm of Songs, 186. 39 Shastri, Kānkrolī kā Itihās, vol. 1, 104–5. 40 For a discussion of the grants, see Jhaveri, Imperial Farman; Richardson, “Mughal and Rajput Patronage”; and Saha, “Creating a Community of Grace.” 41 For the 1578 El Niño Southern Oscillation, see Quinn, Neal, and de Mayolo, “El Niño Occurrences,” 14,450. For failure of rain in South Asia resulting from El Niño Southern Oscillation disturbances, see Borgaonkar, Sikder, Ram, and Pant, “El Niño and Related Monsoon Drought Signals.” For early modern droughts in north India, see Habib, The Agrarian System, 112–22. 42 Barz, The Bhakti Sect, chapters 3 and 4. 43 The bigha is a measure of land that varies regionally across South Asia. Typically, a bigha varies from 1/3 acre to 1 acre. According to land grants housed in the temples libraries of Govind Dev, Madanmohan, and Radhadamodar in Vrindavan, the Gaudiya community owned approximately 655 acres of cultivable land in Braj by 1580. Copies of the grants are also archived at the Vrindavan Research Institute, Vrindavan, and the International Association of Vrindavan Research Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. See Mukherjee and Habib, “Akbar and the Temples of Mathura”; Mukherjee and Habib, “The Mughal Administration and the Temples of Vrindavan”; and Alavi, “The Temples of Vrindavan.” 44 Habib, “From Ariṭh to Rādhākund,” 215. 45 Chidester and Linenthal, “Introduction,” 15. 46 The narrative of the appearance of Govind Dev icon is provided in the Mahāprabhvādi Prākaṭyasaṃvatsarāṇi, a manuscript in the collection of the Potikhana Library, Jaipur (No. 5171, Khasmohor Collection). See Bahura, “Śrī Govinda Gāthā,” 199. The first mention of Govind Dev in administrative archives is in the 1565 land grant. Mukherjee and Habib, “Akbar and the Temples of Mathura,” 235. 47 Priests who currently serve the deity claim that the stone icon emerged in 1525. Roy, The History of Jaipur City, 161. 48 Nath, “Śrī Govindadeva’s Itinerary,” 163. 49 Asher, The Architecture of Mughal India, 68. 50 An inscription on the northern wall of an ancillary shrine in the complex provides the date of the completion of the temple. 51 Mukherjee and Habib, “Akbar and the Temples of Mathura,” 239. 52 Habib, “A Documentary History of the Gosā’ins,” 140. 53 Nobility who served under Akbar sponsored four important sixteenth-­and early seventeenth-­century Gaudiya temples in Vrindavan. Along with Govind Dev and Madanmohan, Raysal Darbari, an officer in Akbar’s court, built Gopinath Temple (ca. 1580–85), while Darbari’s elder brother, Naunkaran, who also served under Akbar, sponsored Jugal Kishor (1627). Entwistle, Braj, 160. 54 Growse, Mathurá, 61. 55 From the late nineteenth century onward, architectural historians have studied the

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temple for its extraordinary amalgamation of “Hindu” and “Mahomedan” styles. Key colonial texts that discuss Govind Dev include Cole, Illustrations of Buildings near Muttra; Fergusson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture; and Havell, Indian Architecture. For more recent engagements, see Asher; The Architecture of Mughal India; Koch, Mughal Architecture; Thiel-­Horstmann, ed. In Favour of Govinddevjī; Case, ed. Govindadeva; and Packert, “Kings of the Mountains” (forthcoming). 56 Asher, The Architecture of Mughal India, 68. 57 Bahura, “Śrī Govinda Gāthā,” 201. 58 Chandra, Medieval India, 167. 59 The first mention of Govind Dev in administrative archives is in a 1565 land grant. See Mukherjee and Habib, “Akbar and the Temples of Mathura,” 235. 60 Habib, “A Documentary History of the Gosā’ins,” lists a number of conflicts that were taken to the Mughal court. 61 As Gayatri C. Spivak writes, “I am thinking basically about the imperialist project which had to assume that the earth that it territorialized was in fact previously uninscribed. So then a world, on a simple level of cartography inscribed what was presumed to be uninscribed. Now this wording actually is also a texting, textualizing, a making into art, making into an object to be understood.” Spivak, The Post-­Colonial Critic, 1. 62 For art production in sixteenth-­century Amber, see Goetz, “The Early Rajput Murals of Bairāt.” 63 For the history of the Amber Rasikapriyā, see Coomaraswamy, “Two Leaves from a Seventeenth-­Century Manuscript.” Desai, “Connoisseur’s Delights” provides an in-­ depth study of the text. 64 The sanctum and the superstructure were desecrated in the eighteenth century. Currently, the vestibule is used as the sanctum of the temple. For a history of the desecration, see Michell, “The Missing Sanctuary,” 115–22. 65 For instance, the early sixth-­century Vishnu temple in Deogarh, Uttar Pradesh. 66 Schweig, Dance of Divine Love, 180. 67 The folio is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Accession Number: 2004-­149-­7). For the rasa mandala in visual culture, see Ghosh, “Krishna’s Dance and Devotion.” 68 Thakur, “The Building of Govindadeva,” 11–69. 69 Kramrisch, The Hindu Temple, 163. 70 Mabbett, “The Symbolism of Mount Meru,” 66. 71 Harivaṃsá, 306. 72 Goodwin, Precambrian Geology, 340. The Precambrian is the geological epoch that began with the consolidation of the earth’s crust and ended with the Cambrian Period 542 million years ago. 73 King, Provisional Index of the Local Distribution, 202. 74 Drake-­Brockman, Mathura, 240. 75 By 1911, the Great Indian Peninsula Railway Company had built a secondary railway line from Kosi in Braj to specifically transport sandstone from the region (Drake-­ Brockman, Mathura, 240). 76 Aynsley, Our Visit to Hindostán, 201. 77 Goswami, Ujjwalanīlamaṇi, 279. 78 The Performance of Devotion to Hari states that the material form of stone (śilā rūpāḥ) is considered to be knowledge (smṛtā vidyā). Bhatt, Haribhaktivilāsa, vol. 5, 532.

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79 Interview with Pandit Goswami, Govardhan, November 18, 2012. 80 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, vii. 81 See Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, for a critique of the nature-­culture binary. 82 The first mention of a painted pichvai appears in Pushtimarg literature in 1739. By 1779, sectarian texts mention that pichvais were used on at least twenty-­five different occasions at the temple of Shrinathji, suggesting that the practice had already been made an integral part of temple service. See Talwar and Krishna, Indian Pigment Painting on Cloth; Skelton, Rājasthānī Temple Hangings; Krishna, Talwar, and Goswamy, In Adoration of Krishna; and Ghose, Gates of the Lord. 83 The inscription is reproduced in Bahura, “Śrī Govinda Gāthā,” 201. 84 Vallabha, Subodhinī, 52. 85 Vaudeville, “The Govardhan Myth,” 11. 86 For a history of the Eucharist, see Macy, The Theologies of the Eucharist. For a discussion on the spatial emphasis in Gaudiya texts, see Holdrege, Bhakti and Embodiment, chapter 5. 87 Holdrege, Bhakti and Embodiment, 251. 88 Srivṛndāvanmāhātmyam, chapters 69–70. 89 Kaviraja, Caitanya Caritāmṛta, 3.6.285–86. 90 Dean, A Culture of Stone; and Cohen, Stories of Stone. 91 Moin, The Millennial Sovereign, 65–66. 92 Seminal texts on the development of Hindu temple architecture in the early centuries of the Common Era include Kramrisch, The Hindu Temple; Coomaraswamy, Essays in Architectural Theory; Meister, “On the Development of a Morphology”; Michell, The Hindu Temple; and Hardy, Indian Temple Architecture. 93 Kramrisch, The Hindu Temple, 114. 94 For Strzygowski and the Vienna School, see Rampley, The Vienna School of Art History. 95 Key texts in the 1980s and the early 1990s that introduced questions of power and politics include Champakalakshmi, Vaiṣṇava Iconography in the Tamil Country; Dehejia, Art of the Imperial Cholas; and Desai, The Religious Imagery of Khajuraho. A seminal study on the provenance of the stone used in early Indian sculpture was geologist Richard Newman’s The Stone Sculpture of India. See also Asher, “Stone and the Production of Image”; and Dehejia and Rockwell, The Unfinished. 96 See, for instance, Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture; and Kohn, How Forests Think, for forms of interspecies living that do not easily fit with modern Western regimes of the nature-­culture duality. For a history of eighteenth-­century scientificism, see Hankins, Science and the Enlightenment.

Three | Forest Epigraph: Bhāgavata Purāṇa, 127. 1 Abu’l-­Fazl, Akbarnāma, vol. 2, 294. 2 Jahangir, Jahāngīrnāma, 313. 3 Lahori, Padshahnāma, vol. 1, 183. 4 Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, 375. Also see François Xavier Wendel’s 1760s account of the region’s topography. Wendel, Les mémoires de Wendel, 82. 5 Mann, “Ecological Change in North India” provides a history of the natural habitat of the region. Also see Drake-­Brockman, Mathura, 17.

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6 Growse, “Sketches of Mathura,” 14. For the rise of Barsana in the 1740s, see Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars, 138. 7 In Mughal administration, the pargana was a unit within a district, or sarkar. The pargana of Mathura included fifty-­five villages surrounding the city of Mathura. See Habib and Habib, “The Political and Economic Geography of Braj Bhūm,” 490–504. Other cash crops grown in Mathura in the early eighteenth century included tobacco introduced by the Portuguese, cotton, hemp, rice, sugarcane, and wheat. For agricultural production in eighteenth-­century Mathura, see Gupta, “Agriculture and Revenue Rates,” 168–82. 8 Habib, The Agrarian System, 128. 9 The Dynasty of Hari states, “śrūyate hi vanaṃ ramyaṃ paryāptatṛṇasaṃstaram.” Harivaṃśa, 52.21. 10 See Corcoran, Vṛndāvana in Vaiṣṇava Literature, for the etymology of the word Vrindavan. 11 For the etymology of the word vana, see Malamoud, “Village et forêt dans l’idéologie de l’inde brâhmanique”; and Sprockhoff, “Āraṇyaka und Vānaprastha in der vedischen Literatur.” 12 See Stevenson and Waite, Concise Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “jungle.” In a groundbreaking exploration of the Sanskrit word jangala, the anthropologist Francis Zimmerman notes that the second-­or third-­century legal text Laws of Manu (Manusmṛti) describes the selection of a territory by the ideal king through a phytogeographic imaginary. The king, according to the Laws of Manu, should settle in the desirable jangala, the semi-­arid dry deciduous forests of north and west India. Zimmermann, The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats, 39. 13 Goswami, Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu, 103. 14 Bhatt, Haribhaktivilāsa, vol. 1, 215–16. 15 Bhatt, Vrajabhaktivilāsa. 16 Jayadeva, Gītagovinda, 137. For late seventeenth-­and early eighteenth-­century usage of the word kunja in Braj, see Snell, “The Nikuñja as Sacred Space.” While Snell focuses specifically on the Radhavallabh sect, Gaudiya philosophers, such as Rupa Goswami in Prayers Glorifying the Divine Couple’s Pastimes in the Bower (Nikuñjarahasyastava), emphasized the significance of meditating on the image of a passionate Radha and Krishna in a secluded bower (Goswami, Nikuñjarahasyastava). For debates regarding the authorship of the Nikuñjarahasyastava, see Brzezinski, “Prabodhānanda Sarasvatī.” 17 After the death of Savant Singh’s mother in Vrindavan in 1728, the ruler visited Vrindavan, Govardhan, and Radhakund for an extended pilgrimage. See Haidar, “The Kishangarh School”; and Pauwels, Mobilizing Krishna’s World. 18 The verse has been translated by Haidar, “The Kishangarh School,” 134. Also see Khan, “The Kishangarh School of Painting”; and Pauwels, Cultural Exchange in Eighteenth-­Century India. 19 See Bleichmar, Visible Empire for the history of Spanish botanical expeditions. 20 See, for example, Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion; and Grove, Green Imperialism. 21 Jahangir, for instance, writes about experiments in grafting fruit-­bearing plants such as the cherry, apricot, and mulberry. Jahangir, Jahāngīrnāma, 333. For Mughal medicine, see Rezavi, Medical Techniques and Practices in Mughal India. For gardens, see essays in Wescoat and Wolschke-­Bulmahn, Mughal Gardens.

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22 Babur, Baburnāma, 162. 23 Beginning with Constance Mary Villiers-­Stuart’s early twentieth-­century account to more recent scholarship by Elizabeth B. Moynihan, Catherine B. Asher, and Ebba Koch, much has been written on Mughal gardens. See Villiers-­Stuart, Gardens of the Great Mughals; Moynihan, “The Lotus Garden Palace of Zahir Al-­din Muhammad Babur”; Asher, “Babur and Timurid Char Bagh”; and Koch, “Mughal Palace Gardens from Babur to Shah Jahan.” Desmond, The European Discovery of the Indian Flora, is a seminal text on colonial gardens, horticulture, and the visual representation of plants. More recent engagements include Tobin, Colonizing Nature; Herbert, Flora’s Empire; and Ray, Under the Banyan Tree. 24 Guha, “The Small Voice of History,” 1–12. 25 The history of the temple’s patronage is provided in Kavi, Vṛndāvan Dhām Anurāgāvalī. Recent histories of Bharatpur include Pande, Bharatpur upto 1826; Natwar-­Singh, Maharaja Suraj Mal; and Rana, Rebels to Rulers. 26 This process was described to me by the priest of Madho Bilas Temple in Vrindavan in 2007. Personal communication, September 19, 2007. 27 See Entwistle, Braj, 302. 28 Jayadeva, Gītagovinda, 92. 29 For eighteenth-­century architecture in regional courts, see Tillotson, The Rajput Palaces. 30 For Shah Jahan’s architecture, see Koch, Mughal Architecture; and Asher, The Architecture of Mughal India. 31 Koch, “The Baluster Column.” 32 See Koch, Mughal Art and Imperial Ideology, 104. 33 Although they acknowledged the Mughal emperor as their sovereign, the eighteenth century saw Mughal governors in Bengal, Awadh, and Hyderabad, among other imperial provinces, asserting a degree of independence. Simultaneously, the regional elite in north India—for instance the Sikhs, the Jats, and the Marathas—rebelled against the throne to declare their independence. For recent analyses, see Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India; Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars; and Richards, The Mughal Empire. 34 See Asher, “Amber and Jaipur: Temples in a Changing State.” 35 For Jaipur’s architecture, see Tillotson, Building Jaipur; and Johnson-­Roehr, “Centering the Chārbāgh.” 36 Atmaram, Savāī Jayasiṃha Carita. Cited in Thiel-­Horstmann, “Govinddevji of Vrindaban and Jaipur,” 86. 37 These included the icons of Madanmohan, Gopinath, Gokulnath, Jugal Kishore, and Gokulchandrama temples in Vrindavan. The icon of Madanmohan was later moved to Karauli, Rajasthan, and Jugal Kishore was moved to the kingdom of Panna in today’s Madhya Pradesh. 38 While popular narratives claim that the town of Dig is the Dirghapura of Braj, a site described in texts such as the Tales of Skanda, historical references to Dig appear only in the eighteenth century after the construction of the Bharatpur garden palace. See, for instance, Awasthi, Studies in Skanda Purāṇa, 73. For Dig’s architecture, see Joshi, Dig. 39 Shah Jahan’s use of floral imagery is discussed in Koch, The Complete Taj Mahal. 40 See, for instance, Pramar, Haveli; and Jain, “Vaishnava Havelis in Rajasthan.”

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41 An exception is Catherine B. Asher’s seminal work on eighteenth-­century flat-­roofed temples, “Mapping Hindu-­Muslim Identities.” 42 Nath, “Śrī Govindadeva’s Itinerary,” 168. Also see Das, Temples of Vrindaban. 43 While Muhammad Saqi Musta‘idd Khan, Aurangzeb’s biographer, explicitly cites the monarch’s orders to demolish temples in Mathura, Varanasi, Udaipur, and Bijapur, the Mughal archive does not mention temple desecration in Vrindavan. Revisionist scholarship thus suggests that Aurangzeb’s temple destruction was a strategy of punitive action to suppress rebellions against the throne. See Eaton, “Temple Desecration and Indo-­Muslim States,” 246–81. Not only did Aurangzeb endorse land grants given by his predecessors to temples in the town, he also personally intervened in resolving property disputes between priests of Govind Dev, the very temple he had allegedly demolished. Aurangzeb’s intercessions in resolving temple disputes in Braj are recorded in the Mathura Documents (1598–1889), Oriental Records Collection, National Archives of India, New Delhi. 44 For the mobilization of charbagh gardens in regional courts, see Joffee and Ruggles, “Rajput Gardens and Landscapes.” 45 For floral canopies in painting, see Aitken, “The Heroine’s Bower.” 46 Bhāgavata Purāṇa, 106. 47 Gokulnath (attr.), Caurāsī Baiṭhak Carit, 19. 48 The Tales of Skanda states, “Viṣṇu is the tree itself. It is the form of Viṣṇu. Its meritorious root is resorted to by noble souls.” Skanda Purāṇa, vol. 17, 1061. Also see Haberman, People Trees; and Findly, Plant Lives. For a history of the Tales of Skanda, see Bakker, The World of the Skandapurāṇa. 49 Bhāgavata Purāṇa, 130. 50 As the historian of religion Graham M. Schweig writes, “The act of speaking to plants appears to be unprecedented in Indian traditions, even within Vaiṣṇava tradition” (“Divine Flora, Divine Love,” 73). 51 Habib, “Dealing with Multiplicity,” 161. 52 Kaviraja, Caitanya Caritāmṛta, 2.17.190–94. 53 For the history of this theatrical form, see Mason, Theater and Religion on Krishna’s Stage. See Lutgendorf, “Imagining Ayodhyā,” for the production of Braj’s sylvan imaginaries in early modern texts. 54 Goswami, “Govinda Darśana: Lotus in Stone,” 274. 55 See, for instance, Jahangir, Jahāngīrnāma, 24. For the use of jasmine in perfume making, see Groom, The Perfume Handbook, 114. 56 Bhāgavata Purāṇa, 129. 57 Bhāgavata Purāṇa, 125. 58 Sanford, Singing Krishna, 45. 59 Snell, “The Nikuñja as Sacred Space,” 74. 60 For temple bowers in texts, see Snell, “The Nikuñja as Sacred Space,” 74. The Mathura Documents housed in the National Archives of India, New Delhi, provide detailed records of the kunjas attached to temple precincts. 61 In an interview, Acharya Mishra, the current priest of Cooch Behar Kunj, mentioned that he had examined late nineteenth-­century photographs of the temple in the collection of the royal family of Cooch Behar to restore the garden in the 1980s. Acharya Mishra, personal communication, May 17, 2012. 62 The Kāmasūtra, for instance, discusses the growing of herbs and flowering plants

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in urban gardens while the Arthaśāstra mentions gardens in royal palaces. See Ali, “Gardens in Early Indian Court Life.” 63 Ali, “Gardens in Early Indian Court Life,” 232. 64 Ali, “Gardens in Early Indian Court Life,” 222. 65 For Sanchi, see Shaw, Buddhist Landscapes in Central India. For Sigiriya, see Bandaranayake, “Sigiriya: Research and Management at a Fifth-­century Garden Complex.” 66 Williams, The Country and the City, 125. Also see Alpers, What is Pastoral?; and Buell, The Environmental Imagination. 67 Mitchell, Iconology, 90. 68 For instance, Nihalchand’s ca. 1731 painting Boat of Love, now in the collection of the National Museum, New Delhi (Accession Number: 63.793), has verses composed by Savant Singh on the reverse. Savant Singh, writing under the nom de plume Nagaridas, composed philosophical works, collections of poetry, and an autobiographical account of his pilgrimage to Braj. Nagaridas, Nāgarīdās Granthāvalī. 69 For attribution to Nihalchand, see Pal, Court Paintings of India, 86. Recent studies include Haidar, “The Kishangarh School”; and Pauwels, Cultural Exchange in Eighteenth-­Century India. 70 See, for instance, a ca. 1750 landscape attributed to Nihalchand in the collection of the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA (Accession Number: 1995.116). The painting has been described by Stuart C. Welch as “Versailles gone berserk.” Welch, Room for Wonder, 130. 71 In 1748, the Kishangarh throne was seized by Savant Singh’s younger brother. Until his death in 1764, Savant Singh remained in Braj in self-­imposed exile, intermittently attempting to recapture the throne, until 1755, when the kingdom was divided between his son and his brother. Haidar, “The Kishangarh School,” 145–47; and Pauwels, Mobilizing Krishna’s World. 72 The art historian Brijinder N. Goswamy notes, “Not much is known about Nihal Chand, except that he was a frequent visitor to his royal patron when he started living in Vrindavan.” Goswamy, The Spirit of Indian Painting, 454. 73 Kavi, Vṛndāvan Dhām Anurāgāvalī. 74 Briggs, “An Autobiographical Memoir,” 99. 75 Grove, Green Imperialism, chapter 7. For a critique of Grove’s arguments on colonial conservationism, see Drayton, Nature’s Government. 76 Grove, Green Imperialism, 387. 77 Thapliyal, Gazetteer of Rural Delhi, 414. 78 The distinction between ludic or playful play and other forms of play such as epistemic play was formulated by the British psychologist Corinne Hutt in her “Toward a Taxonomy and Conceptual Model of Play.” 79 Ghosh, “Tales, Tanks, and Temples,” 194. 80 For a brief history of Chandramanohar Temple, see Clémentin-­Ojha, Le trident sur le palais. 81 Snell, “The Nikuñja as Sacred Space,” 79. My reading of the painting is indebted to Aitken, “The Heroine’s Bower.” 82 Rheede tot Drakenstein, Hortus Indicus Malabaricus. The first European study on South Asian flora was the Portuguese physician Garcia de Orta’s 1563 description of medicinal plants that could be used in European pharmacology. Orta, Colóquios

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dos simples e drogas he cousas medicinais da Índia. For colonial botany in India, see Arnold, Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India. 83 For instance, Roxburgh, Flora Indica. 84 Shirazi’s Alfāz ul-­Adwiyah was translated by Francis Gladwin, an army officer and professor of Persian at the Fort William College, as Ulfâẓ Udwiyeh, Or the Materia Medica and published by the Calcutta-­based Chronicle Press in 1793 (see Shirazi, Alfāz ul-­Adwiyah). For a discussion on Shirazi’s text, see Alavi, Islam and Healing, 36. 85 For the relation between colonial conservation polices and El Niño Southern Oscillation anomalies, see Grove, “The Evolution of the Colonial Discourse” and “The East Indian Company, the Australians and the El Niño.” 86 See Grove, “The Evolution of the Colonial Discourse” and “The East Indian Company, the Australians and the El Niño.” 87 Burke, “Speech on the Nabob of Arcot’s Debts.” 88 Grove, “The East Indian Company, the Australians and the El Niño,” 135. 89 Gadgil and Vartak, “The Sacred Groves of Western Ghats in India,” 152. For a recent critique, see Kent, Sacred Groves and Local Gods. 90 Gold, “Why Sacred Groves Matter: Post-­romantic Claims.” 91 Pierre Bourdieu describes the habitus as “structures constitutive of a particular type of environment” that is grounded in place. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 72. For a recent reappraisal of the emergence of the picturesque in eighteenth-­ century England, see Broglio, Technologies of the Picturesque. For recent scholarship on interspecies encounters, see Hall, Plants as Persons; Haraway, When Species Meet; Kohn, How Forests Think; and Marder, Plant-­Thinking.

Four | Ether Epigraph: Chāndogyopaniṣad, 17. 1 Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie des Organismen, 286. 2 Although initially named Chota (small) Radharaman Temple, since the patron’s grandfather had first built a temple to the icon of Radharaman in Vrindavan in 1826, the temple soon became indelibly associated with Shah Kundanlal, from whom it derived its moniker, “Shahji.” 3 See Haeckel, A Visit to Ceylon. 4 See Arnold, “India’s Place in the Tropical World.” 5 Kaviraja, Caitanya Caritāmṛta, 2.18.68. 6 For philosophical debates on the notion of akasa, see Jhaveri, “The Concept of Ākāśa.” 7 Bhatt, Haribhaktivilāsa, vol. 1, 51. 8 Chāndogyopaniṣad, 118. 9 Lysenko, “The Vaiśeṣika Notions of Ākāśa and Diś,” 422. 10 See Whiteway, Report on the Settlement of the Muttra District. 11 Although art historians such as Josef Strzygowski and George Kubler offered systems of imagining global connectedness in the early and mid-­twentieth century, it was in the 2000s that global art history emerged as a significant force in the Anglo-­ American academy. See Elkins, Is Art History Global?; Strzygowski, Orient oder Rom; and Kubler, The Shape of Time. 12 Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art.

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13 Key texts include Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus; Bhabha, The Location of Culture; and Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind. Recent scholarship on globalization and early modern South Asian art and architecture include Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions; Koch, Mughal Art and Imperial Ideology; Karl, Embroidered Histories; and Schrader, Rembrandt and the Inspiration of India. 14 For a recent biography of Wajid Ali Shah, see Llewellyn-­Jones, The Last King in India. 15 See, for instance, Kapoor, The Saints of Vraja, 365. This was confirmed by Shah K. S. Gupta, Kundanlal’s descendant and the current titleholder of the temple. Interview with Shah K. S. Gupta, Vrindavan, January 17, 2012. 16 Entwistle, Braj, 219. 17 See Nilsson, European Architecture in India; and Metcalf, An Imperial Vision. 18 Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums; and Quatremère de Quincy, Encyclopédie Méthodique. For British neoclassical architecture, see Worsley, Classical Architecture in Britain. 19 For the differences between the two structures, see Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta, 112–14. 20 Growse, Mathurá, 263. 21 Fergusson, History of the Modern Styles of Architecture, 420–22. 22 Asher, Architecture of Mughal India, 323. 23 Asad, The Message of the Qur’ān, 786. 24 Necipoğlu, Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power, 249. 25 Kafescioğlu, “ ‘In the Image of Rūm,’ ” 70. 26 For a recent analysis, see Blessing, Reframing the Lands of Rum. 27 Jahangir, Jahāngīrnāma, 22. 28 The painting was sold on April 6, 2011, by the London auction house Bonhams. 29 Franke, “Emperors of Ṣūrat and Maʿnī,” 126. 30 Marsden, The History of Sumatra, 341. 31 Interview with Shah K. S. Gupta, Vrindavan, January 17, 2012. 32 Ali, The Mughal Nobility Under Aurangzeb, 140. 33 Markel, “ ‘This Blaze of Wealth and Magnificence,’ ” 214. 34 See Ward-­Perkins, “The Shrine of St. Peter’s.” 35 The Capsella Samagher is in the collection of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Venice. 36 For instance, Raphael’s 1515–16 cartoon for The Healing of the Lame Man in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (on loan from the collection of Her Majesty the Queen, Accession Number: Royal Loans.4) and Peter Paul Rubens’ ca. 1625 The Triumph of the Eucharist in the collection of Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (Accession Number: P01699). 37 See Tuzi, Le Colonne e il Tempio di Salomone; Stewart, “Rome, Venice, Mantua, London”; and Vandenbroeck, “The Solomonic Column.” 38 Rare large-­scale usages include the columns on the 1635 Gorges Monument in the Salisbury Cathedral and the south portico of the 1637 Saint Mary’s Church in Oxford. See Durman, “Spiral Columns in Salisbury Cathedral.” 39 Pereira, Baroque Goa, 30. 40 Guillen-­Nuñez, Macao’s Church of Saint Paul, 81. 41 See Fernández, Cristóbal de Medina Vargas. 42 Koch, The Complete Taj Mahal, 156.

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43 Key texts on cosmopolitanism include Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots”; Clifford, Route; Cohen, “Rooted Cosmopolitanism”; and Bhabha, “Unsatisfied.” 44 As we have seen earlier, an iconic sculpture placed on the lintel typically marked the denomination of the temple. 45 Ghosh, Temple to Love, 56. 46 Kaviraja, Caitanya Caritāmṛta, 2.11.201. 47 Cited in Sarbadhikary, The Place of Devotion, 24. 48 For instance, an early twentieth-­century block-­printed cotton namavali acquired by the Japanese artist Kokyo Hatanaka in Mathura is currently in the collection of the Craft Revival Trust, New Delhi. 49 For the worship of manuscripts, see Kim, Receptacle of the Sacred. 50 For instance, a ca. 1830 votive Kalighat painting from Calcutta in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, depicts Chaitanya performing kirtan (Accession Number: IS.214-­1950). 51 For instance, the 1655 Keshta Raya Temple in Bishnupur includes a representation of Chaitanya performing kirtan. 52 See, for instance, Ergin, “The Soundscape of Sixteenth-­Century Istanbul Mosques”; and Atkinson, The Noisy Renaissance. 53 Kramrisch, “Space in Indian Cosmogony and in Architecture,” 104. 54 For instance, during the 1857 uprisings, local communities in Braj looted the British treasury and burned government offices and police and revenue records. Mark Thornbill, “No. 102. Dated 10th August, 1858. Narrative of events attending the outbreak of disturbances and restoration of authority in Muttra 1857–1858,” Foreign and Political Department Notes, National Archives of India, New Delhi, Proceedings No. C 575, 1872; and “Papers relative to Mutinies in E. Indies: Appendix B,” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, 1857–1858, Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London, vol. 44, paper 2363, 117–21. 55 For the history of the idea of akasa, see Chakrabarti, “Ākāśa”; and Duquette, “Towards a Philosophical Reconstruction.” 56 For the concept of ether in Western philosophy, see Cantor and Hodge, “Introduction: Major Themes in the Development of Ether Theories.” 57 Chakrabarti, “Ākāśa,” 104. For the Chāndogyopaniṣad, see Olivelle, The Early Upaniṣads, 12. 58 Halbfass, “Space or Matter?” 94. 59 In Ayurveda, akasa is considered one of the five constitutive principles of the human body (Duquette, “Towards a Philosophical Reconstruction,” 116). In mathematics, the word is often considered synonymous to the idea of zero. See Coomaraswamy, “Kha and other Words.” 60 Kramrisch, “Space in Indian Cosmogony and in Architecture,” 104. 61 Humboldt, Cosmos, 31. 62 Blavatsky, The Theosophical Glossary, 13; and Tesla, “Man’s Greatest Achievement,” unpublished essay, 1907, cited in Laszlo, Quantum Shift in the Global Brain, 111. 63 Wilson, “A New Cosmopolitanism is in the Air,” 355. 64 For sartorial cultures in Lucknow under Wajid Ali Shah, see Trivedi, The Making of the Awadh Culture, 30–33. 65 Kaviraja, Caitanya Caritāmṛta, 1.1.33. 66 Bhāgavata Purāṇa, 139. 67 Stewart, The Final Word, 219.

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68 The 1889 temple was demolished in the 2000s. The icons of the eight sakhis are now worshiped in a new temple completed in 2007. 69 Growse, Mathurá, 263. 70 Reproduced in Haidar, “The Kishangarh School,” 134. 71 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 89. 72 For the relationship between the rasa mandala and the bhumandala in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, see Edelmann, “Dialogues on Natural Theology,” 51. 73 See Holdrege, “Meditation as Devotional Practice.” For aural cultures in Braj, see Wadley, Raja Nal and the Goddess. 74 Stewart, “Replicating Vaiṣṇava Worlds,” 308. 75 Bhatt, Haribhaktivilāsa, vol. 1, 51. 76 Stewart, “Replicating Vaiṣṇava Worlds,” 309. 77 Meister, “On the Development of a Morphology,” 36. 78 Works by Kundanlal, written under the nom de plume Lalitakisori, include the Abhilāṣ Mādhurī and the Laghu Raskalikā. See McGregor, Hindi Literature, 164, for a brief commentary on Kundanlal’s poetry. The current priest serving the temple further affirmed the identity of the pietra dura figure as a representation of Kundanlal during an interview in 2012. 79 Llewellyn-­Jones, The Last King in India, 54. 80 See, for instance, Purohit, “Sociology of Thumri,” 69. 81 “Oude, as a kingdom,” 116. 82 Haberman, Acting as a Way of Salvation, 108–14. 83 As Spivak writes, “The most superior bhava was the sakhi bhāva toward Krishna—to be Krishna’s girlfriend (that is what sakhi is, I mean no disrespect). Many of the male bhaktas were also called by female names. This identity-­crossing and troping of the sexual self did not touch gendering. The object—Krishna—remained male” (“Moving Devi,” 127). 84 The account of a sakhi bhava devotee dressing in red loincloth is reproduced in Goswamy, “The Cult,” 142. 85 Madan, Śrīmad Bhāgavata, 67. 86 See Report of the Maharaj Libel Case. For a history of the court proceedings, see Shodhan, Legal Representations of Khojas and Pushtimārga Vaishnava Polities as Communities. 87 Motiwala, Karsondas Mulji, 33. As Jürgen Lütt writes, “The Maharaja Libel Case influenced English literature on Hinduism for the rest of the century—less in scholarly books, more so in popular descriptions. The extent of its impact can be seen in Max Weber’s study on Hinduism and Buddhism where—due to his sources—the topos of ‘orgiasticism’ obtained prominence.” Lütt, “From Krishnalila to Ramarajya,” 146. 88 Monier-­Williams, “Progress of Indian Religious Thought,” 37. 89 See McGregor, Hindi Literature from Its Beginnings. 90 See Sinha, Colonial Masculinity; and Chowdhury, The Frail Hero and Virile History. 91 For a history of hyper-­masculine nationalisms in India, see Banerjee, Make Me a Man!; and Alter, The Wrestler’s Body. 92 Michelson and Morley, “On the Relative Motion of the Earth,” 333–45. 93 Gandhi, “Watching the Heavens,” 296. For a discussion on akasa and architecture in Gandhi’s writings, see Maddipati, “Nothingness as Scaffolding for Being.” 94 Bhatt, Haribhaktivilāsa, vol. 1, 376–77.

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95 Electricity was introduced in Vrindavan in the 1940s, at which time the chandeliers and glass oil lamps of Shahji Temple were wired for use with electric bulbs. 96 Chakrabarty, “Afterword: Revisiting the Tradition/Modernity Binary,” 295. 97 Ice cores indicate that black carbon (soot) concentrations increased abruptly in this period as a result of carbon emissions from the industrialization of Western Europe. In South Asia, the glacial retreat of the Himalayas became prominent from the 1880s. But much of northwest India, the area north of latitude 21°N and west of 80°E, including Braj, which remained dependent on rainfall during the summer monsoon season (June to September), saw a respite in the 1860s from the droughts of the preceding centuries that were caused by the El Niño Southern Oscillation in the Pacific Ocean. Painter et. al., “End of the Little Ice Age,” 15216–21. 98 Singh, Sontakke, and Singh, “Instrumental Period Rainfall Series,” 1055–66. 99 Between 1850 and 1899, South Asia witnessed twenty-­four major famines, by far the most intensive occurrence of famines in a fifty-­year period. See Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts.

Coda  |  Geoaesthetics in a Hindu Pilgrimage Town 1 I witnessed this ritualized worship of the representation of Braj each time I visited the temple during the summer of 2009. Although a larger Ramachandra Temple is in Sireh Deorhi in Jaipur, this particular temple is in Chandpole Bazaar. 2 Interview with R. S. Gupta, Jaipur, March 20, 2009. 3 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 545. 4 Derrida, On Touching, 144. 5 For the aesthetics of temple worship in Braj, see Packert, The Art of Loving Krishna. 6 Bhatt, Haribhaktivilāsa, vol. 2, 60. 7 For the biography of Keshavrao Dhaiber, see Narwekar, Marathi Cinema. 8 Advertisement for Nandkumar (1938, dir. Keshavrao Dhaiber). Published in Krishnamurti, ed. The 1938 Haripura Congress Souvenir, unpaginated. 9 Report of the Municipal Administration and Finances of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh for the year 1937–1938. 10 Report of the Municipal Administration and Finances of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh for the year 1934–1935, 3. 11 Report of the Municipal Administration and Finances of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh for the year 1938–1939. 12 Murray, A Handbook for Travelers in India and Ceylon, 180. 13 Curzon, “Address from the Brindaban Municipality,” 183. 14 See, for instance, an early twentieth-­century woodblock print from Mathura in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford (Accession Number: EA1966.54). 15 Dated Shatrunjaya patas include a 1792 CE painting in the collection of the Lalbhai Dalpatbhai Museum, Ahmedabad. See Kim, “Re-­formation of Identity.” Scholars date the Brooklyn Museum pata reproduced here to 1750 based on stylistic similarities to a 1745 Jodhpur manuscript. Poster, Realms of Heroism, 197–99. 16 By 1868, roads were being built by the colonial government in Braj. However, it was only in the first three decades of the twentieth century that a massive road-­building project was undertaken to connect the various sites in the region. A road connecting Mathura

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to Gokul, for instance, was built in 1933. In the same year, paved roads were constructed between Kosi and Nandgaon and between Nandgaon and Barsana. “Muttra – Gokul – Mahaban – Baldeo road in the Muttra district,” Public Works Department A, United Provinces, Uttar Pradesh State Archives, Lucknow, File No. 91C/1933, 1933. 17 David Arnold writes that road building paralleled and supplemented the work of the Trigonometrical Survey to impress the “colonial presence on the Indian landscape.” Arnold, Science, Technology and Medicine, 106. 18 Manu Goswami writes that the term colonial state space “denotes the complex ensemble of practices, ideologies, and state projects that underpinned the restructuring of the institutional and spatiotemporal matrices of colonial power and everyday life. The post-­1857 formation of a distinctive colonial state space was effected in and through a range of institutions, representational artifacts, and regulatory practices” (Producing India, 8). Also see Yang, Bazar India. 19 Prakash, Another Reason, 11. 20 Gole, Indian Maps and Plans; and Schwartzberg, “South Asian Cartography.” An exceptional eighteenth-­century representation of Braj with a roadway connecting the pilgrimage sites is in the collection of Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II Museum, Jaipur (Accession Number: 132). 21 Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation. Also see Pinney, ‘Photos of the Gods.’ 22 For the emergence of modern cartography in South Asia, see Edney, Mapping an Empire. 23 Murray, A Handbook for Travelers in India, Pakistan, Burma, and Ceylon, 227. 24 Mikhail Bakhtin’s emphasis on the intentional dimensions of heteroglossia is useful to think of indigenous representations of colonial space as a speech-­act. As Bakhtin writes, “The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention” (The Dialogic Imagination, 293). 25 Gokulnath (attr.), Vanjātrā Braj Caurāsī kos kī Parikramā. 26 Sopher, “Pilgrim Circulation in Gujarat,” 423. 27 Central Pollution Control Board, Water Quality Status of Yamuna River. 28 For recent histories of the Yamuna, see Haberman, River of Love in an Age of Pollution; and Baviskar, Waterscapes. 29 Demos, Decolonizing Nature, 8.

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Index

Abbasid Caliphate, 4–5, 187n8 Abu’l-Fazl, 45, 46, 74 Abu’l-Hasan, 144 Account of the Manifestation of Shrinathji (Śrīnāthjī kī Prākaṭya Vārtā) (Hariray), 66, 191n22 Adam, Robert, 139, 140fig., 141 Adamson, George, 5 Agra, 13map; deaths from 1613–1615 disasters, 47; fort construction, 77; Govind Dev Temple, Vrindavan, and, 75–76; Jahangiri Mahal, 38, 75; red sandstone in, 32; Taj Mahal, 112 agriculture, 71, 98 Ajmer, 13map; Muin al-Din Chishti, shrine of, 47; Chashma-yi Nur, 47–49, 48fig. akasa. See ether Akbar, Jalal al-Din Muhammad: atelier of, 7, 25–26, 43; Fatehpur Sikri abandoned by, 55; History of Akbar (Akbarnāma) (Abu’l-Fazl), 5, 7, 16; hunting grounds and, 97; Millennial History (Tarikhi Alfi) and, 4–5; presenting himself for view, 37–38; History of Hamza (Hamzanāma), 43, 44fig.; religious policy of, 77; temple bequests, grants, and patronage, 70–71, 72–77 Alberti, Leon Battista, 51 Allah, al-Mutawakkil ‘Ala, 4, 187n8 andola torana (archway), 52 Anthropocene, 17–18, 190n72 Architect of Human Dwellings (Samarāṅganasūtradhāra) (Bhoja), 52, 193n62 architecture. See specific temples and palaces

Aristotle, 154 Arnold, David, 190n67, 208n17 art history: eco art history genealogy and approaches, 17–22; landscape and, 64–66; rock, temples, and, 91–95; transterritorial configurations with ecological crises, in 16th century, 3–7 Asad, Talal, 68–69 Asaf al-Daula, 141–42 Ashta Sakhi Temple, Vrindavan, 158 Asiatic Society, Calcutta, 129 Assi Khamba Mosque, Mahavan, 9 Ataga Khan, tomb of, Delhi, 77 Atmaram, Kavi, 109, 127 Aubin Codex, 3, 4fig. Aurangzeb, 114, 195n27, 201n43 Ayurveda, 154, 205n59 Babur, Zahir al-Din Muhammad, 19–20, 101–2, 115 Bada’uni, ‘Abd al-Qadir, 45–46 Badal Mahal, Bundi Fort, 160fig. Bakhtin, Mikhail, 208n24 Banarasidas, 5, 16 bangla baldachin, 106, 107, 110, 115 Barsana, 12, 12map, 97–98, 98fig. Basilica of Bom Jesus, Goa, 149, 149fig. Bennett, Jane, 17–18, 195n18 Bernier, François, 97 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 148fig., 149, 150, 152 Betwa, river, 13map, 56–57 Bhāgavata Purāṇa: about, 190n1; on bhumandala, 159; rasa mandala in, 81, 157, 159, 162; relationship between plants and humans in, 116 233

Bhāgavata Purāṇa, Isarda version: forests in, 101; hydroaesthetics and, 25–27, 26fig., 29–30, 33, 42–47, 46fig., 191n19 Bhāgavata Purāṇa, Palam version: gopis seeking Krishna in the forest, 116, 117fig.; hydroaesthetics and, 38–43, 39fig.; rasa mandala in, 81, 159 Bhagwantdas, 32, 57, 73, 192n27 bhakti (devotion): emotional, 10; Krishna as lover and, 10, 27–28; rise of, 10; topographies of embodied devotion in Braj, 8–13; vaidhi (disciplined) and raganuga (passionate), 10, 188n37 Bhandirvan, 12map, 11 Bharatpur, 12map Bharatpur Fort, Kumbher, 105, 106fig. Bharmal, 74 Bhatt, Gopal, 56 Bhoja, 193n62 bhumandala (orbic representation of the cosmos), 159–60 Bir Singh Dev, 49–57 Bjerknes, Jacob A. B., 16 Blavatsky, Helena P., 155 Boat of Love (Nihalchand), 202n68 Bolton Fine Art lithograph, 176–83, 178fig. Bombay, 13map, 135, 139, 165, 174, 176, 183, 184 botanical gardens, 129–30 botany, colonial, 101, 129–30 Bourdieu, Pierre, 203n91 Bower of Quiet Passion, The (Nihalchand), 100–101, 100fig., 158–59 bowers. See forests, bowers, and vegetal aesthetics Braddock, Alan C., 18 Braj: 20th-century increase in pilgrimage to, 175; ecosystem and population development, 97–98; Mughal architecture incorporated into, 52, 55; overview, 7–8; Three Treasures (teen nidhi) of Braj, 64, 65fig.; topographies of embodied devotion in, 8–13; trade network through, 13; Vaishnava sects in, 12–13. See also circumambulation and visualization of Braj; specific topics, such as land and stone Braudel, Fernand, 14, 22, 27

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British colonialism: anti-British agitation in Braj, 154, 205n54; Lucknow, conquest of, 154; masculinity and, 166; Mathura District, 135; planetary imaginary of the colonized, 167 Broders, Roger, 175–76, 177fig. bubonic plague (pestilence), 47, 192n52 Buddhism, 8, 49, 93, 206n87 Burke, Edmund, 130 Calcutta, 13map, 129, 130, 135, 136, 137, 138–41, 176 cartography. See circumambulation and visualization of Braj cave metaphor, 84 Chaitanya: disciples of, 27; Gaudiya Vaishnavism and, 10–13, 56; Govardhan hill and, 69, 86, 90–91; performing kirtan, 153, 205nn50–51; sites in Braj identified by, 10–11, 31; talismanic diagrams and liturgical texts, 34, 192n33; trees of Vrindavan and, 116–17, 189n49. See also Gaudiya Vaishnavism Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 17–18, 169 Chandramanohar Temple, Jaipur, 127–29, 128fig. Chandravati Temple, Rajasthan, 150 Chappell, John, 16 Chaurasi Khambha Mosque, Kaman, 9, 9fig. Chhachhi, Sheba, 185–86, 185fig., 186fig. Chidester, David, 72 Chittor tower, Rajasthan, 35 Chunni Lall & Co., 33fig., 33, 176 circumambulation and visualization of Braj: haptical, 171–72; origins and original sites, 11–12; pichvais (cloth paintings in Pushtimarg temples), 87–89, 88fig., 179, 180fig., 182; planimetric view vs. frontal perspective, 176, 179; Ramachandra Temple lithograph, 171–73, 172fig., 173fig., 183–84; roadways, introduction of, 179–83; Shatrunjaya pata (liturgical map) and, 178fig., 179; Shrinathji Temple, Nathdwara, and, 181, 181fig.; The Son of Nanda film advertisement and, 174, 175fig.; travel and tourist promotion, 175–76, 177fig., 182, 184; vanayatra

lithographs and votive imagery, 176–79, 178fig., 182–83; woodblock print from Eighty-four Kos Journey through the Forests of Braj (Vanjātrā Braj Caurāsī kos kī Parikramā) (Gokulnath), 183, 184fig. climate change: architecture, materiality of quartzite, and, 94; artistic practice, relationship with, 29; colonial study and regulations, 130; Little Ice Age, 7, 14–16, 169, 207n97; monsoon failures, 5, 16; responses embedded in ecumenical world of Braj, 16. See also droughts colonial state space, 179–83, 208n18 Connoisseur’s Delights (Rasikapriyā) (Mishra), 78–80, 80fig. Constantia, Lucknow, 152, 152fig. Cooch Behar Kunj, Vrindavan, 119, 119fig., 201n61 Coomaraswamy, Ananda K., 20, 68 cosmopolitanism: reconfiguration of modernity and, 169; Shahji Temple and, 135–36, 151, 155, 166 courtyard garden bowers, walled, 118–19, 122–24, 123fig. Crutzen, Paul J., 190n72 Curzon, George N., 176 Darsan, 38, 184 Deeds of Bir Singh Dev (Vīrsiṃhdevcarit) (Mishra), 56–57 deforestation, 23 Deleuze, Gilles, 21–22, 159, 172 Delhi, 13map; as Akbar’s capital, 77; architecture of, 77; Jharna Garden, 123fig.; Qal‘a-i Kuhna Mosque, 77, 78fig.; river pollution from, 185; Shahjahanabad Palace, 106, 107fig., 109fig., 112, 112fig.; Sikandar Lodi and, 30; post-Independence tourism, 184 demasculinization, politics and aesthetics of, 166 Demos, T. J., 185 Derrida, Jacques, 51, 172, 193n59 devotion. See bhakti Devotional Enjoyments of Braj (Vrajabhak­ tivilāsa) (Bhatt, Narayan), 11, 99 Dhaiber, Keshavrao, 174 Dig, 12map

Dig Palace, Dig, 110–14, 111–13figs. droughts: 16th-century megadrought, 3; 1554–1556, 45–46; 1630, 28; 1791, 130; Akbar and, 4–5; architectural projects and, 30–32, 47–49; colonial regulations to combat, 130; frequency of, 28–29; new Vaishnava theology and, 28–29; seeing water and, 29 Dürer, Albrecht, 105–6 Durkheim, Émile, 64 Dynasty of Hari (Harivaṃśa), 61, 84, 85, 98 earth, relationship with, 115–17 ecosystem of Braj, 97–98 Eighty-four Kos Journey through the Forests of Braj (Vanjātrā Braj Caurāsī kos kī Parikramā) (Gokulnath), 183, 184fig. El Niño Southern Oscillation: agrarian crisis and, 71; colonial regulations and, 130; droughts and, 7, 16; global impact of, 15map; Harappan civilization and, 18–19, 190n76; Little Ice Age and, 15–16 Eliade, Mircea, 64 Elias (Elijah) rescuing Nur al-Dahr, 43, 44fig. Entwistle, Alan W., 11 environmental determinism, 17 ether (akasa): concept of, 134–35, 154–55; as ecological cluster, 23; iconography of, as sound, 135, 153–54; from krishnaya, 135, 162, 167; mantras and, 160–62; oikos and, 133–34; Shahji Temple, Vrindavan, and, 23, 135, 155, 166–67; sound, space, and, 135. See also Shahji Temple Fadnavis, Nana, 125–26 famines: 1554–1556, 45–46; after Little Ice Age, 169, 207n99; Akbar and, 5; colonial regulations to combat, 130 Fatehpur Sikri, 13map; abandoned by Akbar, 55; Astrologer’s Seat, 53fig., 193n65; construction of, 35–38; Govind Dev Temple, Vrindavan, and, 75–76; pillar, principal haramsara, 54fig.; Private Audience Hall, 36fig.; public viewing window, 37fig.; torana in, 52; Victory Gateway (Buland Darwaza), 142, 143fig. Faxian, 8

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Fergusson, James, 141 Flirtation on the Riverbank (Nihalchand), 121–22, 121fig., 126 forests, bowers, and vegetal aesthetics: banyan grove on the Yamuna identified as site, 11; The Bower of Quiet Passion (Nihalchand), 100–101, 100fig.; Chandramanohar Temple, Jaipur, 127–29, 128fig.; colonial botany and postromantic approach, 129–31; colonial forest conservation, 126; Cooch Behar Kunj, Vrindavan, 119, 119fig., 201n61; deforestation, 23; Dig Palace, 110–14, 111–13figs.; early references to bowers and gardens, 119–20; eco art history and, 115; as ecological cluster, 23; Gangamohan Kunj, Vrindavan, 102–10, 103fig., 104fig., 106fig., 114–15, 118, 127; geobotanical and theological conceptions and terminology, 98–101; Govind Dev Temple, Jaipur, 108–10, 109fig.; hunting grounds, 97, 126; imperial botany and bio-knowledge, 101–2; Muhammad Shah in the Garden (Mal), 122–24, 123fig.; natural ecosystem of Braj and population growth, 97–98; Flirtation on the Riverbank (Nihalchand) and other paintings, 120–22, 121fig., 126; personhood of sentient plant life and relationship with earth, 115–17, 126; play and, 126–27; Seva Kunj, Vrindavan, 124–27, 124fig., 125fig.; Shahjahanabad Palace, Delhi, 106, 107fig., 109fig., 112, 112fig.; vegetal tectonic and new garden typology, 127–29; walled courtyard gardens, 118–19, 122–24, 123fig. frame, function of, 49–51, 55 frontal perspective, 179 Gadgil, Madhav, 130 Gandhi, Mohandas K., 167, 174 Ganga (river), 13map, 19, 45, 56–57 Ganga Rani, 102, 110, 114, 115 Gangamohan Kunj, Vrindavan, 102–10, 103fig., 104fig., 106fig., 114–15, 118–19, 127, 137 gardens. See forests, bowers, and vegetal aesthetics Garuda, 81

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Gaudiya Vaishnavism: Akbar, relationship with, 74, 77–78; Braj sites and, 10–13; cultivable land held by, 196n43; difference and non-difference, 189n48; Govardhan, loss of, 70–71; Govind Dev Temple, Vrindavan, and, 72–74; Performance of Devotion to Hari (Haribhaktivilāsa) (Bhatt, Gopal), 56, 99, 135, 153, 162, 167–68, 172, 197n78; Radhakund and Krishnakund ponds and, 71–72, 72fig.; river Yamuna, function of, 56; sakhis and sakhi bhava, 164–66; talismanic diagram and, 34. See also Chaitanya gendered masquerade, 162–66, 163fig. geoaesthetics: art history and, 22, 23, 190n81; as concept-term, 20–22; humannonhuman relationship and, 131; of immanence, 174–75, 183; intersection of creative practices, biophilic liturgy, and ecocatastrophes, 120; Kunstgeographie and, 136; movement from biospheric networks to, 167; planetary, 186; relinking of human action and embodied space, 182; transdisciplinary approach and, 66. See also ether; forests, bowers, and vegetal aesthetics; land and stone; water, the river Yamuna, and hydroaesthetics geophilosophy, 21–22 ghats, 30. See also Vishram Ghat Ghosh, Pika, 127 Gokul, 10, 11, 12map, 70, 174 Gold, Ann G., 130 Gopinath Temple, Vrindavan, 196n53 gopis (cowherd girls), 116, 117fig., 157–65 Goswami, Jiva, 90 Goswami, Manu, 208n18 Goswami, Rupa: Govind Dev Temple, Vrindavan, and, 72–73; The Ocean of the Essence of Devotional Rasa (Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu), 27, 72, 99, 188n37; Prayers Glorifying the Divine Couple’s Pastimes in the Bower (Nikuñjarahasyastava), 199n16; Splendid Sapphire (Ujjvalanīlamaṇi), 87; on uttering Krishna’s name, 153; vision-centric religious aesthetic, 27; Vrinda icon and, 99

Goswamy, Brijinder N., 202n72 Govardhan, 12–13, 12map, 68–69 Govardhan hill: as body of Krishna, 61–64; Chaitanya and, 69, 86, 90–91; as identified site, 11; injunction on taking stones from, 85–86; materiality of the land and, 66; rock-divine-body assemblage and, 85–91, 85fig.; satellite image, 62fig.; Shrinathji icon, 66–69, 65fig., 67fig., 88fig.; shrines, makeshift, 86, 86fig.; the Yamuna interconnected with, 64 Govardhan hill, Krishna lifting: Bilvamangala folio, 40–42, 42fig.; Govind Dev lintel relief, 78–84, 79fig., 89; Jugal Kishor Temple façade, 91, 93fig.; narrative of, 40–42, 61–64; sandstone sculpture from Mathura, 62–63, 63fig. Government House, Calcutta, 138–41, 140fig. Govind Dev icon, 57, 73, 74fig., 108 Govind Dev Temple, Jaipur, 74fig., 108–10, 109fig., 128 Govind Dev Temple, Vrindavan: antechamber doorway and lintel relief, 78–80, 79fig., 82fig., 89–91; cave-like sanctum, 84; construction, form, and control of, 57, 72–78, 73fig., 75fig., 76fig., 83fig.; construction of, 57; Govardhan ridge, relation to, 84; ground plan, 83fig.; rasa mandala, 159; yogapitha (union of Radha and Krishna) as location of, 83–84, 89 Govindadasa, 77 grants, imperial, 70–71, 73 Great Acceleration, 18 Great Stupa, Sanchi, 40, 41fig., 51fig., 120 Grove, Richard H., 5, 16 Growse, Frederic S., 74–75, 97, 141, 158 Guattari, Félix, 21–22, 58, 159, 172 Guha, Ranajit, 102 Gupta, Shah K. S., 145, 151 Gwalior Fort, Gwalior, 35, 36fig., 38, 52

Handbook for Travellers in India, Burma and Ceylon, A (Murray), 182 haptical figures of contact, 171–72 Harappan civilization, 18–19 Haribhai, Anupram, 176 Haripura, 174 Harrison, George, 7 heteroglossia, 182 Hidden Teachings of the Singers (Chāndogyopaniṣad), 135, 154 Hindu Temple, The (Kramrisch), 94 Hinduness as conceptual category, 188n25. See also Vaishnavism History of Akbar (Akbarnāma) (Abu’lFazl), 5, 7, 16 History of Hamza (Hamzanāma), 43, 44fig., 45 History of Jahangir (Jahāngīrnāma) (Jahangir), 47, 48, 199n21 History of Shah Jahan (Shāhjahānnāma), 52 Hodgson, Marshall G. S., 58 Hoysalesvara Temple, Halebid, 81 humans and nonhumans, relationship between, 115–17, 126, 131 Humboldt, Alexander von, 126, 133–34, 154–55 hunting grounds, 97, 126 Hutt, Corinne, 202n78 hydroaesthetics. See water, the river Yamuna, and hydroaesthetics Hymn to the Yamuna (Yamunāṣṭakam) (Vallabha), 43–45 hypostyle temples, 114

habitus, 131, 203n91 Haeckel, Ernst, 133–34, 154 Half a Tale (Ardhakathānaka) (Banarasidas), 5 Halhed, Nathaniel B., 188n25

Jahan, Nur, 97 Jahangir, Nuruddin Muhammad, 47–49, 48fig., 97, 144, 193n66, 199n21 Jahangiri Mahal, Agra, 38, 75 Jai Singh II, 57, 108

Indian State Railways, 175–76 Indra, 61–63, 194n4 Industrial Revolution, 18 Ingold, Tim, 59, 65, 194n10 Isarda Bhāgavata Purāṇa. See Bhāgavata Purāṇa, Isarda version Istalif garden, 101–2

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Jaipur, 13map; Govind Dev Temple, 74fig., 108–10, 109fig.; Chandramanohar Temple, 127–29, 128fig.; Ramachandra Temple, 171–73, 172fig., 173fig., 183–84; Vrindavan mapped onto, 127 Jami Mosque, Mathura, 107, 108fig. jangala (“jungle”), 99, 199n12 jasmine, 118, 119, 125, 128 Jaunpur, 13map, 16 Jayadeva, 99–100, 105 Jharna Garden, Delhi, 123fig. Jugal Kishor Temple, Vrindavan, 91, 92fig., 93fig., 196n53 Kaman, 9, 9fig., 12map Kāmasūtra, 201n62 Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta, 136 Kaviraja, Krishnadasa, 69, 91, 116, 134, 156–57, 188n31, 189n49 Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire, 139, 140fig. Keshta Raya Temple, Bishnupur, 205n51 Khair al-Manazil Mosque, Delhi, 77 Khan, ‘Abd al-Nabi, 58, 107 Khandalavala, Karl, 190n4 Kilburn, Benjamin W., 176, 177fig., 182 kirtan (devotional singing and dancing), 151, 153, 205nn50–51 Kolff, Dirk H., 49 Kramrisch, Stella, 20, 94, 154 Krishna: birth of, 10; Braj as eternal place of, 7–8; as embodiment of sound, 160; Govardhan hill as body of, 61–64; kirtan and, 153; Lord of Govardhan (Govardhannath) or Shrinathji icon, 66–69, 65fig., 67fig.; as Lord of the Mountain, 63; as lover, 10, 28; as Mohan, 115; rasa mandala (circular dance of divine love), 81; singing name of, 135; sought by gopis in the forest, 116, 117fig.; topography of embodied devotion in Braj and, 8–13; trees and, 115–16; vasant festival and, 167–68, 168fig.; Vrindavan and body of, 90. See also Govardhan hill, Krishna lifting Krishna and Radha: in bower, 100–101, 105; Flirtation on the Riverbank (Nihalchand), 121–22, 121fig., 126; ludic play and, 127; in Seva Kunj, 124–25; Shahji Temple rasa mandala, 157–58; in

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Shri­bhatta’s poetry, 128, 129fig.; yoga­ pitha (union of Radha and Krishna), 83–84, 89, 90 Krishna, depictions of: as child being carried by Vasudeva, 40, 41fig.; dancing with cowherds (Connoisseur’s Delights), 78–80, 80fig.; water sport (Isarda Bhāgavata Purāṇa), 25–27, 26fig., 45, 46fig.; water sport (Palam Bhāgavata Purāṇa), 39–40, 39fig. See also Govardhan hill, Krishna lifting Krishnakund pond, 71–72, 72fig. krishnaya as ether, 135, 162, 167 Kubler, George, 17, 203n11 Kundanlal, Shah, 133, 135–37, 155, 162–66, 169, 206n78. See also Shahji Temple kunjas (bowers). See forests, bowers, and vegetal aesthetics Kunstgeographie, 136 Lakshmi, 68, 69fig. Lal, Shah Bihari, 137 Lalita, 158–59, 162–63 Lamb, Hubert H., 16 land and stone: agricultural failure and land theology, 71; cave-like sanctum, Govind Dev, 84; eco art history and, 91–95; as ecological cluster, 22; Govind Dev antechamber doorway and lintel relief, 78–84, 79fig., 82fig., 89; Govind Dev Temple construction, form, and control, 72–78, 73fig., 75fig., 76fig., 83fig.; landscape and land, 64–66; materiality of geomorphological matter, 66; natural world linked to materiality of sculpture and architecture, 64; rock/ divine-body assemblage, agentive, 85–91; sectarian control Shrinathji Temple and land, 70–71; self-manifesting icon of Shrinathji, 66–69, 71; topophilic spacemaking, 69, 72. See also Govardhan hill; Govardhan hill, Krishna lifting; sandstone Linenthal, Edward T., 72 Little Ice Age: about, 14–16; droughts and, 7; end of, 169, 207n97 Lord of Govardhan (Shrinathji) icon, 66– 69, 65fig., 67fig., 71, 88fig., 89, 195n27

Lorenzen, David N., 188n25 lotus, 20, 34, 42, 55, 64, 76, 77 Lotus Garden, Dholpur, 115 Lucknow, 13map; conquered by the British, 154; Constantia (Martin residence), 152, 152fig.; fish motif, 146–47, 147fig.; Kundanlal and, 136–37; Roman Gateway (Rumi Darwaza), 141–42, 143fig., 144; sartorial cultures of, 156; Shahji Temple, Vrindavan, and, 141–47; West Gateway, Qaisar Bagh Palace, 147fig. ludic play, 127, 202n78 Lütt, Jürgen, 206n87 Madanmohan Temple, Vrindavan, 74 Mahavan, 12map, 9, 97 Maharaja Libel Case, 165–66 Maharaja of Banaras, 57, 193n77 Mal, Nidha, 122–24, 123fig. Mal, Todar, 74 Man Singh I, 52, 57, 73–74 mandalas, 153–54, 161–62, 161fig. See also bhumandala; rasa mandala circular dance Mann, Michael E., 14 mantras, 160–62 maps. See circumambulation and visualization of Braj Marsden, William, 144 masculinity, colonial, 166 Mathura, 12map; bazaars of, 183; geological surveys of, 85; Jami Mosque, 107, 108fig.; Krishna’s birth, 10; lions near, 97; multiplication of sacred sites around, 11; Nagda-Muttra (Mathura) railway line, 175; prison in, 10; riverfront, 33fig.; trade and, 13, 30, 191n23. See also Braj; Vishram Ghat Mathura District, 85, 135, 141 Matthes, François E., 14 Meiss, Millard, 17 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 64 Mexico, cocoliztli epidemic in, 3 Millennial History (Tarikh-i Alfi), 4–5, 6fig. Mirabai, 28 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 18 Mishra, Acharya, 201n61 Mishra, Keshavdas, 56–57, 78–80, 80fig.

Mittal, Jagdish, 190n4 Mohan (epithet of Krishna), 115 Monet, Claude, 18 Monier-Williams, Monier, 165 Monserrate, Antonio, 5, 7, 13, 193n65 monsoon failures, 5, 16 Mughal-style gardens, 114–15 Muhammad Shah, 122 Muhammad Shah in a Garden (Mal), 122–24, 123fig. Mulji, Karsandas, 165 Mullick mansion, Calcutta, 141, 142fig. Mundy, Peter, 29 Murray, John, 182 Nagda-Muttra (Mathura) railway line, 175 Nath, Ravinder, 114 Naunkaran, 91, 196n53 neoclassicism, 137–41, 168–69 Nihalchand: about, 120, 202n72; Boat of Love, 202n68; The Bower of Quiet Passion, 100–101, 100fig., 158–59; bower painting (ca. 1745), 120–21; Flirtation on the Riverbank, 121–22, 121fig., 126 Nimbarka Vaishnavism, 189n48 non-separation theology, 61 nondualism, philosophy of (shuddhadvaita), 71 North Atlantic Oscillation, 16 Nur al-Dahr, 43, 44fig. Ocean of the Essence of Devotional Rasa, The (Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu) (Goswami, Rupa), 27, 72, 99, 188n37 oecologie, 133, 154 oikos, 133–34 Orchha, 13map, 49, 56–57 Orta, Garcia de, 202n82 Palam Bhāgavata Purāṇa. See Bhāgavata Purāṇa, Palam version Pallava rulers, 19 paradise garden (charbagh) style, quadripartite, 114–15, 122–24, 123fig. parergon, 51, 193n59 pata (liturgical map), Shatrunjaya, 178fig., 179

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Performance of Devotion to Hari (Haribhaktivilāsa) (Bhatt, Gopal), 56, 99, 135, 153, 162, 167–68, 172, 197n78 pichvais (cloth paintings in Pushtimarg temples), 87–89, 88fig., 179, 180fig., 182, 198n82 picturesque, the, 131, 176 pietra dura panels (Shahji Temple, Vrindavan), 155–66, 157fig., 163fig. pilgrimage. See circumambulation and visualization of Braj planetary imaginary of the colonized, 167 planimetric perspective, 176, 179 play, Vaishnava philosophy of (lila), 126– 27 Praise for the Young Lord of the Cowherds (Bālagopālastuti) (Bilvamangala), 40–42, 42fig. Prayers Glorifying the Divine Couple’s Pastimes in the Bower (Nikuñjarahasyastava) (Goswami, Rupa), 199n16 Puri, Madhavendra, 68–69 Pushtimarg Vaishnavism: about, 12–13; Akbar and, 74; circumambulation tour of, 110; Gaudiyas ousted from Govardhan hill by, 89; non-dualism and, 189n48; pichvais and, 179, 198n82; Shrinathji icon and, 68, 87; Shrinathji Temple, control over, 70–71 Qaisar Bagh Palace, Lucknow, 147fig. Qal‘a-i Kuhna Mosque, Delhi, 77, 78fig. Quatremère de Quincy, AntoineChrysostôme, 138 raas lila theater, 117 Radha, 87, 157. See also Krishna and Radha Radha Gopal Temple, Vrindavan, 158 Radhakund pond, 71–72, 72fig. Radharaman Temple, Vrindavan, 137, 137fig. raganuga bhakti (passionate devotion), 10, 188n37 railways, 175–76 Rajput School, 39–40 Ramachandra Temple, Jaipur, 171–73, 172fig., 173fig., 183–84 Ramasawamy, Sumathi, 182

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rasa mandala circular dance, 81, 155–66, 157fig., 160fig., 163fig. rasa theory, 27–28 roadways, colonial, 179–83, 207n16–208n17 rock. See land and stone Roman Gateway (Rumi Darwaza), Luck­ now, 141–42, 143fig. Roxburgh, William, 130 “Rum,” 142–44 sakhi bhava (affective impersonation of a sakhi in worship), 165–66 sakhis (female attendants of Krishna), 157–65 Samarqandi, Muhammad Fazil Miskin, 27 sandstone: beige, 37; of Govardhan hill, 85, 85fig.; red, 32, 35–38, 89; transport of, 197n75 Sas Bahu Temple, Gwalior, 150, 150fig. Sati Burj (Vishram Ghat), Mathura, 32–38, 32fig., 34fig., 35fig., 49, 55, 122 Schweig, Graham M., 201n50 seeing, act of: of Krishna, 28–29; viewing windows and, 37–38; Vishram Ghat, Mathura, and, 33–34; of water, 29, 38, 45, 55, 57–58 serpent (naga) worship, 70 Seva Kunj, Vrindavan, 124–27, 124fig., 125fig. Shah Jahan, 97, 105–12, 115 Shahjahanabad Palace, Delhi, 106, 107fig., 109fig., 112, 112fig. Shahji Temple, Vrindavan, 134fig.; ether and, 23, 135, 155, 166–67; façade figures playing music and dancing, 136fig., 151– 53; fish motif, 138fig., 146–47; fountains, 144–46, 145fig., 146fig., 151; gateway, 141–44, 143fig.; the global, cosmopolitanism, and, 135–36, 151, 155, 166; ground plan, 139fig.; iconography of ether and, 135; inner sanctum (garbhagriha), 146fig., 155, 156fig.; kirtan, iconography of ether as sound, and, 153–54; Lucknow citations and influences, 141–47, 152, 157fig.; neoclassicism and, 137–41, 138fig.; oikos and, 133; pietra dura panel figures (central pavilion) and rasa mandala

circular dance, 155–66, 157fig., 163fig.; Solomonic columns, 147–51, 148fig.; Vasanti Kamra, 167–68, 168fig.; Wajid Ali Shah sculpture, 163–64, 164fig. Shapiro, Gary, 20–21 Shatrunjaya pata (liturgical map), 178fig., 179 Shirazi, Nur al-Din Muhammad, 130 Shribhatta, 128, 129fig. Shrinathji icon, 66–69, 65fig., 67fig., 71, 88fig., 89, 195n27 Shrinathji Temple, Govardhan, 68, 70 Shrinathji Temple, Nathdwara, 181, 181fig. Sikandar Lodi, 30–31 Sind (Sindh), 126 Singh, Badan, 105, 110 Singh, Ratan, 33 Singh, Savant, 100, 122, 199n17, 202nn68,71 Smith, Jonathan Z., 64 Solomonic columns, 147–51, 148–50figs. Son of Nanda, The (Nandkumar; film), 174, 175fig. Songs of Govinda (Gītagovinda) (Jayadeva), 99–100, 105, 188n34 Sopher, David E., 184 sound. See ether Southern Oscillation. See El Niño Southern Oscillation space as element. See ether Spivak, Gayatri C., 165, 197n61, 206n83 Splendid Sapphire (Ujjvalanīlamaṇi) (Goswami, Rupa), 87 St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome, 147, 148fig., 149, 152 Standing Buddha, Sarnath, 21fig. Stoermer, Eugene F., 190n72 stone. See land and stone Strzygowski, Josef, 203n11 sulh-i kull (religious reconciliation or tolerance), strategy of, 5 Suraj Mal, 102, 110–13 Suri, Sher Shah, 13, 77 Surya, 30, 191n20 Taj Mahal, 112 Tales of Skanda (Skanda Purāṇa), 116, 201n48

Tales of Vishnu (Viṣṇu Purāṇa), 61, 63 talismanic diagrams, 34, 35fig., 192n31 temples. See specific temples by name Tesla, Nikola, 155 Three Treasures (teen nidhi) of Braj, 64, 65fig. Tiefenthaler, Joseph, 57 topophilia, 23, 69, 72, 171 toranas (archways), 34–35, 49–55, 50fig., 51fig., 53fig., 57 touch as liturgical practice, 172 tourist promotion, 175–76, 177fig., 182, 184 Town Hall, Bombay, 138–39 transversality and water, 25, 58–59 travel and tourist promotion, 175–76, 177fig., 182, 184 trees, 115–17, 167–68. See also forests, bowers, and vegetal aesthetics Tuan, Yi-Fu, 64 tulabhara torana (ceremonial archway), 49, 52, 57 Uddhava, 31 Upper Shivalaya Temple, Badami, 81 vaidhi bhakti (disciplined devotion), 10, 188n37 Vaishnavism: confrontation between Vedic pantheon and, 62; sects of, 12–13; theology and political governance interwoven in hydroaesthetics, 55–58. See also bhakti; Gaudiya Vaishnavism; Krishna; Pushtimarg Vaishnavism Vajranabha, 11 Vallabha, 12–13, 30–31, 64, 65fig., 68, 71; Yamunāṣṭakam (Hymn to the Yamuna), 43–45 vana (woodlands), 99 vanayatra lithographs, votive, 176–79, 178fig., 182–83 Varanasi, 12, 13map, 175 Vartak, V. D., 130 vasant festival, 167–68, 168fig. Vaudeville, Charlotte, 70 vegetal aesthetics. See forests, bowers, and vegetal aesthetics viewing window (jharoka), 37–38, 37fig. Vishnu, 62, 68, 69fig., 81

inde x   241

Vishram Ghat, Mathura, 31fig.; droughts and architectural projects at, 30–32, 49; Jai Singh II’s temple at, 57; Sati Burj, 32–38, 32fig., 34fig., 35fig., 49, 55, 122; tourist promotion, 176, 177fig., 182; viewing window at, 38 visualization of Braj. See circumambulation and visualization of Braj Vithal Nagar, 174 Vitthalnath, 70–71 Vocabulary of Drugs (Alfāz ul-Adwiyah) (Shirazi), 130 Vrinda (goddess), 99 Vrindavan, 7fig., 12map; body of Krishna and, 90; fantastic land of, in Performance of Devotion to Hari, 167–68; identified as encampment, 10–11; as key sacred site, 89–90; manifest form of the nonmanifest and recreations of, 127; name of, 98–99; new architectural typology in, 75; Seva Kunj, 124–27, 124fig., 125fig.; temple sponsorship, 196n53; tree jurisdiction dispute, 116–17. See also specific temples Wajid Ali Shah, 136–37, 156, 163–64, 164fig. Water Diviner, The (Chhachhi), 185–86, 185fig., 186fig. water sport: Isarda Bhāgavata Purāṇa, 25–27, 26fig., 46fig.; Palam Bhāgavata Purāṇa, 39–40, 39fig. water, the river Yamuna, and hydroaesthetics: Chashma-yi Nur, Ajmer and, 47–49, 48fig.; conservation of, 5; descent of the Ganga relief, Mamallapuram, 19, 19fig.; devotional culture and, 27–28; Elias (Elijah) rescuing Nur al-Dahr (History of Hamza) and, 43, 44fig.; Flirtation on the Riverbank (Nihalchand),

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121–22, 121fig., 126; Govardhan hill and the Yamuna interconnected, 64; Isarda Bhāgavata Purāṇa and, 25–27, 26fig., 29–30, 33, 46fig., 42–47; Islamicate aesthetics and, 58; liquescent materiality of water, 27, 45, 52; liturgical significance and immanent energy of the Yamuna, 13; new visual language of, 25–27; Palam Bhāgavata Purāṇa and, 38–43, 39fig.; parallel lines to represent, 40–42; pollution of the Yamuna, 185; purification by rivers, 25, 56; Radhakund and Krishna­ kund ponds, 71–72, 72fig.; river Betwa, 56–57; satellite image of the Yamuna, 62fig.; Sati Burj and, 32–38, 32fig., 34fig., 35fig., 49, 55; seeing water, act of, 29, 38, 45, 55, 57–58; Shahji Temple fountains, 144–46, 145fig., 146fig., 151; torana on Vishram Ghat and, 49–55, 50fig.; toranas (archways) and, 34–35, 52, 53fig., 57; transversality and, 25, 58–59; Vaishnava theology and political governance interwoven in, 55–58; Hymn to the Yamuna (Yamunāṣṭakam) (Vallabha), 43–45; Vishram Ghat and, 30–32, 31fig., 49, 57. See also droughts Watts, James, 190n72 Weber, Max, 206n87 weight, celebration of, 52, 57 Wilson, Rob, 155 Winckelmann, Johann J., 17, 138 Wyatt, Charles, 138–39, 140fig. Yamuna, river. See water, the river Yamuna, and hydroaesthetics Yasodha, 81, 82fig. yogapitha (union of Radha and Krishna), 83–84, 89, 90 Zimmerman, Francis, 199n12

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