Envisioning Hindu Reverence

Artist Statement

Growing up in Southeast Asia within missionary communities, I was infused with reverence and with empathy for cultures and communities not my own. Born in Thailand, I spoke Thai before English. By the time I graduated from high school, I had attended fifteen different schools in five countries.

Over the past decade, I have resumed traveling the world, including multiple return trips to India, starting 60 years after my first childhood visit, when my family returned to Thailand, following a furlough in the US.

With this series, I celebrate the deep reverence that can be found in Hindu India…despite and within the frenetic hubbub generated by India’s 1.3 billion people. I focus on scenes of reverence for two Hindu deities: 

• The goddess Ganga is a personification of the Ganges River, which is a holy space for Hindus. Hindu devotees who reside near the river perform daily sunrise and sunset worship on the banks of the river and bath in her blessed waters. Millions more devotees from around the subcontinent make special pilgrimages to do so.

• The god Krishna, revered for his compassion, love and playfulness, is the focal point of the Holi festival. The festival is intensely reverent for many participants. At the same time, Holi is a riot of celebratory fun, as devotees throw and rub multi-toned powders and liquids on themselves and one another.

These scenes show us something of the diversity of ways in which Hindus represent the divine, which is understood to take many forms, including male and female. This tradition stands in stark contrast with the “religions of Abraham” – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – where there is a single and masculine deity.

Setting the Scene

Diana Eck, chronicler of India’s sacred geography, writes that “anywhere one goes in India, one finds a living landscape in which mountains, rivers, forests, and villages are elaborately linked to the stories of the gods and heroes. The land bears the traces of the gods and the footprints of heroes. Every place has its story, and conversely, every story in the vast storehouse of myth and legend has its place.”

The stories of this collection take place in northern India, below the magnificent Himalayas. The Ganga tumbles out of the foothills in Rishikesh and bursts onto the verdant plains at the holy city of Haridwar. The Yamuna River, also rising in the Himalayas, winds past Vrindavan, youthful home of Krishna. At Prayagraj, the Ganga joins the Yamuna and the mythical underground river Sarasvati, then continues past Varanasi, among the holiest of Hindu cities.

Reverence for Mother Ganga

Also from Diana Eck’s lyrical sacred geography of India:

The Ganga is the river of India—a single river flowing from the Himalayas, gathering tributaries, and streaming across the fertile plains of north India. At the same time, the Ganga is the source of all sacred waters everywhere in India. The Ganga is also a goddess—Ganga Mata, “Mother Ganga,” and Ganga Devi, “Goddess Ganga.” Her true headwaters are not really in the highest Himalayas, but are said to be in the highest heaven, emerging from the very foot of Vishnu. She was carried in the water pot of Lord Brahma, and when she plummeted from heaven to earth, her cascades fell first on the head of Lord Shiva. It is no wonder that the most famous hymn to the river calls her “the embodied goodness of the gods.” 

India’s love for the Ganga is not only spiritual. Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of newly independent India, eloquently professed his devotion for the Ganga in this portion of his last will and testament:

My desire to have a handful of my ashes thrown in the Ganga at [Prayagraj] has no religious significance, so far as I am concerned. I have been attached to the Ganga and the [Yamuna] rivers in [Prayagraj] ever since my childhood and, as I have grown older, this attachment has also grown. I have watched their varying moods as the seasons changed, and have often thought of the history and myth and tradition and song and story that have become attached to them through the long ages and become part of their flowing waters. The Ganga, especially, is the river of India, beloved of her people, through which are intertwined her racial memories, her hopes and fears, her songs of triumph, her victories and her defeats. She has been a symbol of India’s age-long culture and civilization, ever-changing, ever-flowing, and yet ever the same Ganga. … Smiling and dancing in the morning sunlight, and dark and gloomy and full of mystery as the evening shadows fall; a narrow, slow and graceful stream in winter, and a vast roaring thing during the monsoon, broad-bosomed almost as the sea, and with something of the sea's power to destroy, the Ganga has been to me a symbol and a memory of the past of India, running into the present, and flowing on to the great ocean of the future. 

Reverence for Krishna and Radha

Krishna is one of the most widely revered and popular Hindu divinities. The name means “black” or “dark as a cloud;” in traditional depictions he has blue-black skin.

Krishna grew up in Vrindavan and the nearby area, known as Krishna’s playground. That’s also the title of John Stratton’s recent book, where he describes Krishna as:

“…a god with a childhood that practically overshadowed his adulthood. All over India people worship the baby Krishna, the toddler Krishna, the naughty boy Krishna, the amorous Krishna. They sing about him, read about him, write poems about him; painters have for centuries gloried in his vivid blue face. The warrior Krishna of the Gita commands allegiance, but devotees cherish his growing-up years with a special delight. 

A cowherd himself, Krishna was renowned as a lover and popular with the gopis (wives and daughters of the other cowherds). The music of his flute drew the gopis from their homes to dance ecstatically with him in moonlit forest glades.

Krishna’s favorite gopi was Radha, from the nearby village of Barsana. In one Holi festival origin story, the youthful Krishna despaired that the fair-skinned Radha would like him, given his dark skin color.  Krishna’s mother suggested that he approach Radha and ask her to color his face however she wanted. She did so, they became a couple, and a colorful tradition of Holi was born.

On a more exalted level, C. Mackenzie Brown describes theological texts from about the fifteenth century, where Krishna and Radha’s relationship predates and results in the creation of the universe:

“In the beginning, Krishna, the Supreme Reality, was filled with the desire to create. By his own will he assumed a two-fold form.

From the left half arose the form of a woman; the right half became a man.

The male figure was none other than Krishna himself; the female was the Goddess Primordial Nature, otherwise known as Radha.”

“Radha and Krishna have become the parents of the universe, including humankind…[and] Radha…the Supreme Mother.”

Selected References

Eck, Diana L. India: a Sacred Geography. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2012 (especially chapter 1, “A Sacred Geography, An Imagined Landscape” and chapter 4, “The Ganga and the Rivers of India”).

Hawley, John Stratton. Krishna’s Playground: Vrindavan in the 21st Century. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2020 (especially chapter 1, “Paradise – Lost?”).

Hawley, John Stratton and Narayanan, Vasudha. The Life of Hinduism. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006 (especially chapter 7, “Holi: the Feast of Love” by McKim Marriott).

Hawley, John Stratton and Wulff, Donna Marie. The Divine Consort: Radha and the Goddesses of India. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986 (especially “The Theology of Radha in the Puranas” by C. Mackenzie Brown).

Hawley, John Stratton and Wulff, Donna Marie. Devi: Goddesses of India. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996 (especially “The Goddess Ganga in Hindu Sacred Geography” by Diana L. Eck).