ABOUT CONSTELLATIONS

What is a remainder? That which endures, transcends, and triumphs against the tyranny of context. It may be ruinous, museumised, but not encased in a treasure-box. It breathes into other times and epochs, not of its youth, but surely, of its long life. Remainders have long, enduring lives and narratives, much like Krishna, who charts this world out of context, out of history, tired, endless, nameless, formless, shape-shifting.

Bhakti came to me out of context. As an intrusion. A surprise. I started walking a path that was not uncharted, whose milestones I did not know how to read. This project is a collection of notes from such aimless, purposeless walking through the world that is Krishna’s body - a remainder.

I grow into a deluded, loving, suspicious, anxious devotee-monster in this story. My hammer being my anthropological imagination, the world renders itself into a series of nails – a constellation of remainders. Each, as Walter Benjamin would have reminded us, is complete and acute within itself. And yet in a disruptive continuity with another of its comparable nature, if not its kind. This research project and the journey enabled by it are, then, a protest against typologies, taxonomies, and contexts. I try to break out of the tendency within social science knowledge systems that try to make sense of the world by typifying things, that the things must then live inside and never travel out of. So, the anthropology of religion must talk to its predictable category-friends - ritual, culture, internal hierarchies and protocol, theological texts explaining the set of practices, and remain at a distance from other concept-words like capital symbolised usually by tall buildings and shiny objects. In this space, I note the desperate travel of things and entities outside of the cage of context and type, becoming foreign in their own homes, and making friends with foreigners.

This story or constellation is in motion. It walks over, under, and through me. I walk in and out of spaces and times, collecting and adding to this journey. I become a fragment and a thread simultaneously, a shapeshifting amoeba-like creature. Krishna is a currency, motif, god, human character, and a continued and intuited presence in this story. He and I converse in every component of this story. I am full of doubt about the actual sacrality of what I experience, I ask him questions like - is this real Bhakti? Why then does caste and other social divides persist within it? Why is there so much suffering and neglect? He responds at times in silence, and sometimes in cryptic gestures. I make a professional life out of this conversation, and my journey, just like others who sell Krishna-kitsch in the baazaars of Vrindavan. Krishna becomes muse, god as also currency for gathering economic and cultural capital.