Performing Bhakti: An Artistic Array
The word bhakti is usually translated “devotion,” but its range is actually much wider than this individual-sounding translation suggests. Bhakti is intrinsically connected to social and artistic performance. The word’s etymological relation to bhajan, religious singing, is close, and this relationship is reflected in many performance genres. But as a people-pleaser and an avenue to the souls of millions, bhakti is all over Bollywood.
Bhakti’s ambit is not confined to film and vocal music. Bhakti also connotes specific foods and scents. It has an elaborate footprint in sculpture and painting, and there are distinctively bhakti forms of drama, as well. Bhakti’s presence in Indian culture is so marked that it has sometimes been said to be the closest Indian-language equivalent to what is meant in English by the word “religion.” For some observers, at least, bhakti spans the realms of Hindus, Muslims, Jains, Christians, and Buddhists, and it matters in secular contexts too.
In May 2016, the South Asian Studies Council at Yale University hosted a remarkably successful two-day conference entitled “Exploring Bhakti: Is Bhakti a Language of Power or Protest?” This event, organized by Swapna Sharma, provided an occasion to investigate one of the most difficult questions associated with bhakti—its relationship to various forms of power. The results are about to be released in a volume called “Bhakti and Power: Debating India’s Religion of the Heart,” which has been edited by Jack Hawley, Christian Novetzke, and Swapna Sharma (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019).
Yale’s second bhakti conference, “Performing Bhakti: An Artistic Array,” also scheduled for May 2019, has a distinctively different emphasis than the first. It focuses on an interlocking set of performance practices associated with bhakti. Quite a number of these have especially to do with Krishna and the world that surrounds him, for Krishna’s role at the juncture of Indian art and religion is a celebrated one. This is the point at which our conference begins, but it moves on to comprise a great deal more. Please see the associated program for details.
One of the significant features of “Performing Bhakti: An Artistic Array” is the presence of performers themselves, who pursue and reflect on their own work in evening events open to the general public. Our keynote performer on Friday May 3 is Shrivatsa Goswami of Vrindavan, who is renowned for week-long performances of the Bhagavata Purana that are simultaneously traditional and inventive. The most recent of these (March 2019) was performed at Mt. Govardhan, not far from Vrindavan, but Shrivatsa Goswami also travels to much more distant locales.
On Saturday evening May 4, we have a chance to consider two contrasting performance traditions of India’s best known dance form, Bharatanatyam. The well-known classical Bharatanatyam dancer and teacher Geeta Chandran, based in Delhi, inaugurates the evening. Trained as a Carnatic vocalist, she nonetheless weaves the poetry of the north Indian saints into her Bharatanatyam repertoire. In the second part of the Saturday program we meet Hari Krishnan of Wesleyan University, a scholar and dancer of the courtesan-devadasi traditions in South India that were largely submerged as classical Bharatanatyam was invented and widely patronized in the early twentieth century. Davesh Soneji of the University of Pennsylvania, whose scholarship in this area is renowned, participates in both the performance and the discussion surrounding it.
Working sessions of the conference are organized according to medium and region, often featuring enjambments between recognizably different media and locations. Regionally, we encompass Bengal, Nepal, Gujarat, Rajasthan, northern India (especially Braj), and Cambodia. As to medium, we bring in painting, sculpture, drama, cuisine, the adornment of images, and different genres of vocal music. By focusing principally on questions of performance, we explore a considerable band of Indian experience. By attending to bhakti as our single overarching theme, we attempt to tread a single path through this complex, verdant, and sometimes tangled forest.
Conference Venue: Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven CT.
Please email swapna.sharma@yale.edu or amaar.al-hayder@yale.edu with any questions or comments.