Radharamana. Image courtesy – Param Tomanec

One of India’s most outstanding attractions is its rich profusion of stories about saints—all varieties of holy persons who, in all imaginable and unimaginable ways, are celebrated as successful transcenders, crossers-over, ecstatics, and general reassurers that there is a greater reality, a truth, a divinity (or countless divinities, or a divinity within), a better way of being and becoming—saints (or sants, or seers) who affirm “the lure of the excess that marks the sacred” (Meltzer and Elsner, Saints: Faith Without Borders, ix). It was in 1978 that, during my first visit to India (as an American university drop-out “baby-boomer”-cum-seeker), I was drawn to Vrindavan, “Krishna’s playground” a dusty temple town where stories of Krishna-devoted saints of yore abound. While in Vrindavan, I was especially drawn to one particular temple, that of the petit image of Krishna named Rādhāramaṇa (“He Whose Joy is Rādhā”) and to the story of the renunciant-saint Gopal Bhatta, this temple’s sixteenth-century founder, to whom, we are told, Rādhāramaṇa appeared, “self-manifest,” from one of the Śālagrāma-śilās—sacred stones—that he had previously found in the Kali Gandaki river bed in Nepal. Years later, this same Rādhāramaṅa temple and the worship practices of its present-day priests would become an object of my doctoral research on Caitanya (Gauḍīya) Vaiṣṇava mūrti-sevā—the practices of perpetual ritual and devotional attendance on sacred images, especially images of Krishna and his consort Rādhā. For me, this research was related to a personal search, the object of which may be more negatively than positively expressed. Simply put, my upbringing in mid-twentieth-century middle-class, Protestant Christian American surroundings, with all its conveniences and reassurances of rightness and righteousness, seemed the epitome of disenchanted life. India, I reasoned, would be a promising place to discover the opposite, call it if you will—dare I say—“enchantment.”

Yes, I will dare to say I was searching for—and continue today to search for—enchantment, as the antidote to my own and the wider fog of cynicism that increasingly pervades and envelopes the global spheres (blogosphere and the like). It’s a fog that affects me still today as I visit India (for perhaps the thirtieth time), creeping in and shrouding me especially when I visit Vrindavan—more than four decades since I first arrived there—by the explosion of construction mushrooming for ever-increasing numbers of “religious tourists.” So I take refuge from this twenty-first-century din and promise of cultural drought in the Rādhāramaṇa temple, absorb the time-suspending mood of its cooling enclosure, its white marble alcoves inscribed with Brajabhāṣā stanzas telling the story of Śrī-jī’s (Rādhāramaṇa’s) miraculous appearance, its silk-wrapped Bhāgavata Purāṇa positioned on a speaker’s low wooden platform. And of course, there is the main attraction of this stone- and marble-ordered space—the 11-1/2-inch tall, black stone, mildly smiling form of Rādhāramaṇa. Poised delicately yet confidently on his silver throne, raised and recessed, in his celebrated tribhaṅga—triple-bent dancing pose, his disproportionally large, black-pupiled conch eyes gazing back out to all who gather to gaze at him, Rādhāramaṇa sports his radiant yellow, blue, red, or any other colored outfit of the day, accented with seasonal flowers and flower garlands. Singers sitting cross-legged in the alcove at the opposite, back end of the temple courtyard serenade Rādhāramaṇa while I and a few other visitors settle on the stone floor. We gaze and listen, listen and gaze, being present and yielding our fragmented inner worlds to divine Presence.

But let’s return to Gopal Bhatta and his story. Compared with the hagiographies of numerous other saints of India, Gopal Bhatta’s life and works may appear modest, or even unremarkable. Why do I see him in particular as nourishing my search for enchantment? From the sparse references to him (apparently, he insisted that contemporary writers such as Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja, the author of the seventeenth-century Bengali Caitanya-caritāmṛta, not to write about him), we know of his origin in south India, his meeting there with the itinerant saint from Bengal, Caitanya, his subsequent renunciation of home to settle in Vrindavan, his journey to Nepal to find Śālagrāma-śilās (on Caitanya’s request), his return to Vrindavan, and, finally, (perhaps after some years residing in Vrindavan) the sudden, miraculous appearance of Rādhāramaṇa in response to Gopal Bhatta’s intense longing to serve such a three-dimensional form of Krishna. Eventually, he gives charge to one of his householder disciples for continuing the daily worship of Rādhāramaṇa, and it is from the latter’s family that descendants presently perform the worship, following in large part the procedures specified in a certain text, the Haribhaktivilāsa, credited by the present temple priests (albeit not without contention) to Gopal Bhatta.

Of course, the story of Rādhāramaṇa’s quite sudden appearance is enchanting, though certainly not unique in India. Any number of mūrtis are celebrated as self-manifest (svayambhū). Even if reason prods me to rationalize these stories as born from a felt need of legitimation, I hold to the conviction that an all-powerful God can, and occasionally does, enact what, from our ever-so-limited perspectives, are miracles. But is this the enchantment I seek?

In his book The Work of Enchantment, Matthew Del Nevo writes, “For the creator who will enchant us, enchantment is a task. Enchantment is a task in our time, in any time perhaps, although the resistances differ between one time and another. Even we who seek enchantment, who realize that there is no soulfulness without enchantment and who realize that soullessness and disenchantment go equally together, even for us soul-work is a task” (Del Nevo, 97, emphasis in original). As the specific resistance to enchantment in our time, Del Nevo names “the economy” as an umbrella term for what now prevails—commodity capitalism. Conversely, he writes, enchantment is a resistance to the “totalizing objectivism and realism that capitalism conjugates” (ibid.).

But how does Gopal Bhatta figure into this analysis of enchantment? For me, based on the little we know of him, he represents a way of life characterized by patient resistance to whatever form objectivism might have taken in his time, and by extension, in our time, in all places, not least in Vrindavan itself. The “excess that marks the sacred” in the story of Gopal Bhatta is his “excessive,” determined devotion to a God comprehended as absent, even as he is felt to be present everywhere, especially in Gopal Bhatta’s heart, and especially in the form of Rādhāramaṇa, allowing all temple-goers to see, to gaze upon his charming form. Gopal Bhatta’s “task” was to defy the naysayers of divinity acting in the world. His story is one of establishing a sacred routine—the daily offering of strictly vegetarian food (bhojana), dressing and ornamentation (sṛṇgāra), and singing (samāj gāyana) for the comfort and entertainment of a God celebrated as a charming, mischievous, irresistibly attractive (kṛṣṇa) person whose primary “task” is to show how “soul-work” can be effectively undertaken to effect enchantment.

While doing my research at Rādhāramaṇa temple, residing for several weeks in 2001 in a rented flat just a few steps away from Rādhāramaṇa gheṛa, one day an electrician, a local Brajbāsī, came to repair a light switch. As I watched him, the young man turned and asked me, in a slightly mocking tone and friendly yet condescending glance, “So, have you seen Krishna?” Although I had been daily viewing Krishna in his form as Rādhāramaṇa (and other forms in neighboring temples), I resisted the urge to respond defensively. Our repairman seemed to be saying, “However much you seek, you will not find what you are seeking here. If you had been born here, like me, then you would be always seeing Krishna.” Sure enough, his not-so-subtle question-cum-dismissal caused me to feel twinges of imposter syndrome. But then, upon reflection, I remembered that Gopal Bhatta was not a native of Vrindavan, yet he had, by the intensity of his devotion, attracted Krishna to be manifest here in the form of Rādhāramaṇa. He thereby contributed to the task of making it possible for the likes of me to come there—coming from the farthest and deepest reaches of resistance to enchantment, even drawing on the medium and products of commodity capitalism (such as money and commercial jet transportation) to be instrumental in my coming. Had my mind been clearer at the time, I would have replied to the electrician, “I’m working on it. I’m doing soul work. It takes time and patience. I’m taking inspiration from Vrindavan saints like Gopal Bhatta. Krishna may reveal himself to me any time he wishes.”

I like to think that my “soul-work” is ongoing and that stories—or hagiographies—of saints like the modest Gopal Bhatta are an important tool for this work. To quote Del Nevo (p. 4) again, in discussing art as essential for enchantment, he writes,

What I have called “the work” of enchantment—by which I mean the activity that leads us to it and trains us for it, namely, reading, listening, and gazing—is our way of accessing this other world while still in this one.

Reading, listening, and gazing—these activities have been integral to my search as well as my research at the Rādhāramaṇa temple in Vrindavan. By reading the sacred literature—especially the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, which tells the story of Krishna in Vrindavan and of early saints (bhāgavatas); by listening to the sādhus who expound on these teachings, often elaborating on the words attributed to Krishna (why “attributed to” rather than “spoken by”?!), and listening to the kīrtan in Rādhāramaṇa temple and other Vrindavan temples; and, indeed, by gazing at the charming form of Rādhāramaṇa, every day in a new, striking display of cloth, ornaments and flowers, the careful, lapidary work of soul-making has its cumulative effect over time.

Within the compound (gheṛa) of the Rādhāramaṇa temple is the tomb of Gopal Bhatta, an enclosed shrine within a larger enclosed space. I like to sit here in front of the conical-dome-shaped marker of this sixteenth-century Krishna-bhakta. This tomb area is a place of seclusion within a place of seclusion, cared for by three or four ascetic monks (sādhus) who cook and offer their food, in meditation, to Gopal Bhatta, feeding the cow who visits here once a day with the cuttings from the sabzis. Here I like to reflect on the passage of time, on varied scales, as a way to put my present concerns into perspective. There is the nearly five hundred years since Gopal Bhatta and his companions—other important saints, including Sanātana, Rūpa, Jīva and others—settled here, well over twice the period of my own country’s existence as a nation. And just the last forty-odd years since I first visited Vrindavan—how much has changed with the influx of the likes of myself, people from all over the world, bringing so much currency, stimulating a brisk commodity capitalist market of religious tourism along with their—our—hopefully devotional intentions.

I also reflect back into geological time. After initially settling in Vrindavan, Gopal Bhatta walked to the Kali Gandaki river in the Himalayas to find Śālagrāma-śilās, ammonite fossils washed down from the Damodar Kunda lake at six thousand meters altitude—fossils rising from the sea with the relatively young mountains of “only” fifty million years of tectonic plate pressure. What is this life of mine but a blip on the radar screen of eternity? What indeed! All the more reason to continue assiduously reading, listening, and gazing--anticipating the heart’s opening to the treasure of enchantment that the saints offer us—however much their stories are exaggerated, hyperbolic hagiographies (as Edith Wyschogrod argues in her book Saints and Postmodernism).

Preoccupied with such thoughts, as I walked through Loi Bazaar in the early morning of September 12th, 2001, a cloth merchant reading a newspaper in his just-opened shop saw me and motioned me over to see something on the paper’s front page. The World Trade Center had been blasted into fiery shreds by two hijacked commercial jets. I was jolted from my reverie of living aloof from the outside world’s insanities and was again reminded of my imposter syndrome. Years later (last year), I made a pilgrimage to Ground Zero in Manhattan. I gazed into the gaping empty black granite squares that mark the footprints of the two towers and peered up at the soaring steel and glass edifices that seem to assert a triumphalist defiance of consumer capitalism’s roaring resistance to enchantment. What, I wondered, would Gopal Bhatta say to all of this? In the cutting winter windy rain, as I wrestled with my umbrella, I wanted to hear him calling me back to Vrindavan, where he and his friends would wander, calling out in devotional anguish, “O Krishna, where are you now, where are you wandering? Please show us, if just for a moment, your enchanting smile and playful glance!”