ABSTRACT
Kṛṣṇa is one of the most captivating and beloved of Hindu deities, whose divine exploits are celebrated in all parts of India in devotional poetry, scriptures, theological works, visual arts, pilgrimage traditions, dramatic performances, and an array of other cultural forms. 1 The Bhāgavata Purāṇa is the consummate textual monument to Vaiṣṇava bhakti, or devotional, traditions and recounts the divine drama through which Kṛṣṇa, the supreme Godhead, descended to earth in approximately 3000 BCE and unfolded his līlā, divine play, in the region of Vraja in North India. 2 This preeminent Vaiṣṇava text, which is generally held to have originated in the Tamil region of South India between the ninth and tenth centuries CE, 3 provides a robust example of the “scripturalizing” strategies by means of which a popular devotional text that originated outside of the dominant discourse of the brahmanical Sanskritic tradition succeeded in achieving canonical status not only within Vaiṣṇava bhakti traditions but also within the orthodox brahmanical canon of śāstras (scriptures). In this essay I will interrogate the mechanisms of scripturalizing at work in the case of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, which involve a complex interplay between two countervailing processes: the processes of Sanskritization and vedacization, on the one hand, and the processes of vernacularization, on the other. As we move from an analysis of the hegemonic discursive practices of Sanskritization and vedacization to an examination of the counter-hegemonic practices of vernacularization, we will move from the world of the text to the text-in-the-world and from the scripturalizing of texts to the scripturalizing of humans.
