The University Seminar on South Asia
Seminar Chair, Carla Bellamy ([email protected])
Seminar Rapporteur, Kamini Masood ([email protected])
""Eternally Lifting Mount Govardhan"
by John Stratton Hawley, Claire Tow Professor of Religion, Barnard College
Monday, April 1, 2024
6:00pm Eastern Time, Faculty House and Zoom
In-person and online attendence option Preregistration required for Zoom (see link below).
Attendees are cordially invited to a post-talk catered reception at Faculty House to celebrate Professor Jack Hawley’s retirement. NOTE: While a formal RSVP is NOT required to attend Jack Hawley's talk in person or to attend the reception, having a rough head count will help for planinng. Please RSVP by clicking this link: https://forms.gle/H7TzVTHBuGm1JBHJA
Faculty House directions: https://facultyhouse.columbia.edu/content/directions
Abstract: In one of the first articles I ever published (“Krishna’s Cosmic Victories,” 1979) I proclaimed, on the basis of an ever so unsystematic survey of visual representations of stories of Krishna’s early life, that the episode most frequently and sometimes most boldly depicted was the one in which Krishna lifts Mt. Govardhan. We can amplify the record with examples from Southeast Asia. Why this prominence—and how? I will ask this question from a particular vantage point: Udaipur, 1680-1730. There we witness an unparalleled effort, for its time, to give visual representation to poems bearing the signature of Surdas. Several questions emerge: (1) Is there a special connection to the emotions? (2) What happens when a poem becomes a painting? (3) Is the Vallabha Sampraday involved, with its famous worship of Shri Nathji only 25 miles away? (4) Does the environment matter—the seasonal monsoon and the physicality of the Aravalli range? (5) Or are we meeting something eternal and essentially unchanging instead: an archetype?
