Review: Krishna’s Playground: Vrindavan in the 21st Century, by John Stratton Hawley

Abstract

Jack Hawley has devoted his academic career to studying Vaishnava devotional (bhakti) groups centered on Krishna. Much of his research over the last five decades has been conducted in Vrindavan, a once-small town in the “wilderness” (the “van” in Vrindavan) about 90 miles from the outskirts of New Delhi. Deeply revered by the devotees of Krishna as an idyllic land of pastures and forest glades, the surrounding district (Braj) provides the background to many beloved tales of Krishna’s pastimes, or lila. The town itself is nestled in an oxbow of the sacred Yamuna river, which is central to many of the stories and rituals enjoyed by Krishna’s devotees.Hawley seems extremely well integrated into the region’s life and rhythms and his deep local knowledge is on display throughout the text. He begins his tour of Vrindavan with detailed discussions of ongoing environmental destruction, land development mania, Disneyfication of sacred sites, manic real estate frenzy, and the mind-numbing political corruption that makes it all possible. Existing and proposed Krishna-based theme parks and shopping malls are described in vivid detail.Since 1970, the professor at Barnard College has personally witnessed Vrindavan’s transformation from near idyllic pilgrimage town (though never the paradise depicted in some nostalgic accounts, of course) to bustling metropolitan sprawl, with high rise apartment complexes cluttering the skyline and the still sacred but hideously polluted and diminished Yamuna river channeled, trashed, toxic, and lifeless. Even the most devout pilgrims no longer risk bathing in the deadly effluent. Hawley provides readers with nightmare images—for example, cows choking on discarded plastic bags—and recurring mentions of the monkey problem. In recent decades, Vrindavan’s resourceful monkeys have taught each other to steal eyeglasses and cell phones. Working in collusion with savvy street kids, these rogue primates drop without warning from eves and awnings to snatch valuables from their startled victims. The loot is then returned to owners by the children for a reward. The children pay their simian collaborators with food. While Hawley is clearly fed up with this symbiotic scam, readers may find it intriguing.ISKCON and its many offshoots and competitors play major roles in the trendy, overdeveloped Vrindavan taking form with great speed. (Curiously, most of the western ISKCON devotees in the town are Russian.) In Hawley’s analysis, “The new Vrindavan could not have developed in the way it has without the particular vision of globalization that the Hare Krishna movement has fostered” (91). The ISKCON faction centered in India’s high-tech incubator Bangalore is especially wealthy, powerful, and ambitious. Hawley devotes a chapter to the group’s partially constructed 70-story temple, the Vrindavan Chandrodaya Mandir. When completed it will be the tallest religious structure on the planet, towering over the long lost pastoral paradise of Krishna’s childhood. Its interior exhibits will edify tourists and pilgrims with anachronistic dioramas and state-of-the-art 3-D projections of the old Vrindavan it has helped destroy.Later chapters discuss competing architectural visions of Vrindavan old and new, the struggle between preservationist and futurist factions fighting for control of the town, the abuse and care of widows (Vrindavan has long provided a rough, but holy, haven for widows discarded by their relatives), the varied influences of ISKCON and rival international new religious movements, and descriptions of the religious careers of Hawley’s Goswami friends. The book concludes with discussions of new versus old, destruction versus preservation, constructed versus primeval, ruin versus renewal, and virtual versus real.The book is an elegy as much as a scholarly tome, written in a style that is highly personal, anecdotal, idiosyncratic, and intimate. Its poetic language and the author’s assumptions about readers’ background knowledge may discourage undergraduates and those unfamiliar with South Asian religion. Readers comfortable with basic Indian religious vocabulary (both Hindi and Sanskrit) will have an easier time with occasional passages where Hawley neglects to translate terms. One suspects that Hawley viewed this book as a culmination of his career and wrote it exactly the way he wished, academic conventions be damned. More power to him.In his final passages, Hawley portrays the rapacious overdevelopment of Vrindavan as emblematic of the disastrous ecological destruction accelerating all around us wherever we live. Hawley concludes with a warning: “Vrindavan is the sign of our times” (297).