Paper short abstract:

Rasa, the emotional response evoked by a work of art, shapes a complex devotional aesthetic formulated in sixteenth-century north India to experience the beloved god Krishna, intensely, intimately, and viscerally. The visual imagery on seventeenth-century temples, I argue, explore how to stimulate such aesthetic experience.

Paper long abstract:

Rasa, the emotional response evoked by a work of art, lies at the core of a complex devotional aesthetic that was formulated in the sixteenth century to experience the beloved god Krishna, intensely, intimately, and viscerally. This turn marks a radical departure from the intellectual approach found in earlier texts dedicated to Krishna. At this time, the Gaudiya Vaishnava movement, led by the Bengali saint Chaitanya (1486-1533), swept north India and Bengal to the east, in a frenzy of passionate song, dance, and ecstatic worship, which we tend to collectively designate as bhakti for convenience. These practices centered on Krishna as the supreme reality, and explored the nuances and complexities of his relationship with his beloved, Radha, in particular. While previous scholarship has examined the textual explications of devotional rasa and its articulation in other media such as songs, seventeenth-century temples, I argue, offer yet another set of commentaries or explorations of the aesthetic experience through the characters in Krishna's life. To do so I focus on the imagery on one Bengali temple at the site of Bishnupur, a significant locus of Gaudiya activity under the generous patronage of local kings. This paper locates the rasamandala, a circular form depicting Krishna's erotic dance with the gopis on the Shyam Ray Temple of 1643 in the preoccupation with stimulating devotional experience to reach the divine.