On Katha and Koshtak: Imaging the Seven-Day Sermon in the Vallabha Devotional Community

Presenter:

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Abstract

Over the last two decades, seven-day sermons (saptas) dedicated to celebrating the life and poetic memory of Lord Krishna have become one of the most popular and pervasive mediums for mass religious education in India, and increasingly around the world. Seated on a throne at the head of the katha congregation, through whom divine speech flows, is the globetrotting guru-preacher – one of the most compelling global images of bhakti today. I propose to explore how the powerful image of Vallabhacharya spreading his teachings through saptas, and specifically, Bhagavata Katha, is created by preachers in live homiletic performance. In this paper, I focus on Gujarati-language sermons performed by Pushtimargi preachers alongside devotional iconography of Vallabhacharya in western India and the United States. I ground this contemporary study in largely untapped 19th and 20th century Gujarati-Brajbhasha-Sanskrit catalogues (koshtak) that bring together hagiographies, katha charts and guidelines, and detailed illustrations of Vallabha and his descendants with devotees. I trace the carefully constructed image of Vallabhacharya performing saptas in these materials, paying close attention to continuities from the Vedic and Puranic traditions, commentarial works and varta literature as well as new artistic representations of guruhood and preaching that emerge in the modern context. By analyzing the ways in which Pushtimargi preachers remember Vallabhacharya as a preacher of the Bhagavata, I hope to shed light on the significant role that images of preaching play in shaping and sustaining local and transnational publics of bhakti.