9. Seeing, Imagined, and Lived: Creating Darshan in Transnational Gaudiya Vaishnavism

The Religious Body Imagined - Pamela D. Winfield

Anandi Silva Knuppel [+-]
Lawrence University
Anandi Silva Knuppel is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Lawrence University. Her main research focuses on themes of lived religion, multisensory ethnography, and religious practices in transnational Hindu traditions. She has also published works on performance and classicality in Indian classical dance, and consults on digital humanities projects in South Asian Studies and related fields.

Description

Scholarly literature on South Asian religions defines darshan as a ubiquitous practice across Hindu traditions. Scholars often define the practice as “seeing and being seen” by a deity most often in the context of consecrated temple images. My project takes this definition as a starting point rather than the end point and explores what “seeing” means within the context of a specific theology and for individual devotees in transnational Gaudiya Vaishnavism. The tradition provides detailed guides to the form of the tradition, what devotional bodies are, what sensory perception should be, the practices one should undertake, how to perform them, and what to expect out of them. However, the textual imaginary of seeing is only one dimension to darshan. The ways that these imagined structures for bodily senses are put into practice and into bodies changes what seeing means in this tradition and complicates our assumptions about everyday religious practices.

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Citation

Knuppel , Anandi Silva . 9. Seeing, Imagined, and Lived: Creating Darshan in Transnational Gaudiya Vaishnavism. The Religious Body Imagined. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 201-222 May 2024. ISBN 9781781799727. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=39653. Date accessed: 29 Mar 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.39653. May 2024

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