Wednesday
12
March 2025
4:30 PM IST
Location
Room 008, Amrut Mody School of Management
Central Campus
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Vrindavan in the Crucible of Time
Talk
John Hawley
Claire Tow Professor of Religion
Barnard College
Columbia University
Speaker
Jack Hawley has been coming to Vrindavan for 50 years, and has seen huge changes. In this illustrated lecture he will focus on the embattled Yamuna, the real estate explosion, gurus new and old, women seeking refuge, and the "weekending" of Vrindavan. What does it mean to speak of "heritage" here? Does it live in a world where we do not?
Speaker
John Hawley
John Stratton Hawley-informally, Jack—is Claire Tow Professor of Religion at Barnard College, Columbia University. His recent books on India's bhakti traditions include A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement (Harvard, 2015), Sur's Ocean (with Kenneth Bryant, Harvard, 2015), and Sūrdās: Poet, Singer, Saint (Primus, 2018), where Surdas comes into art. Krishna's Playground: Vrindavan in the 21st Century (Oxford, 2020) has been translated into Hindi as Kṛṣṇa Līlābhūmi (Rajkamal, 2022). Jack has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow, and often a fellow of the American Institute of Indian Studies. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
