What am I doing right now?

I am currently working on getting my 1992 Gopāla-campū doctoral dissertation ready for publication. I knew this wouldn't be easy and I have been procrastinating because there are just so many other projects that beg for attention. But the opportunity has arisen for the Gopāla-campū work to finally be published so it is do or die now.

When I finished the thesis work at SOAS, my advisor, J.C. Wright, wanted to get it published by the university publisher. Career-wise it would have been a good move. But I have never been very career-oriented, no doubt a huge character flaw where worldly life is concerned.

Something Friedhelm Hardy said during my oral examination also affected me disproportionately. Hardy was a professor at King's College and a scholar for whom I had great admiration. He was jovial and gregarious as well as a brilliant man. He lived not very far from where we were staying in London, though I was hardly a part of his social circle. I only went there once, and I also met him once in his office. It was a bit of an honor to me that he was one of my examiners. If I had been able to do everything that I originally wanted to, it would have really been to follow some of the lines he explored in his magnum opus Viraha-bhakti and fully explore the theme of separation in Gaudiya Vaishnava bhakti as exemplified by GC. The essential difference of parakīyā and svakīyā is that the former is dominated by separation, the latter by union. 

Hardy's book starts with Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's feelings of separation and follows the mood through the Bhagavatam to the Alwars and even looks for comparison in St. John of the Cross. It is a magnificent piece of scholarship and extremely relevant to understanding the psychology of bhakti. Hardy quotes Forster's character Godbole from A Passage to India, whose plaintive bhajan is explained to be the gopi is praying for Krishna to come but he never comes. He never comes.

During my oral exam, in which Hardy praised my work, he made a "small" complaint that he had only been quoted once and that in a rather throwaway reference to something about the campū genre and had nothing to do with the primary thrust of his life's research, viraha, which is such a central theme of Gopāla-campū.

I blushed a bit when he said that. Hardy himself had spent many years working on his doctoral dissertation at Oxford, which kept on expanding until it took form as Viraha-bhakti. Somehow he had been in a position to work on it for 12 years before he finally published it with Oxford U.Press. I told him that I had to cut off my research at the point I did in order to finish quickly. So the primary emphasis in my work had been on the Sanskrit, for which Prof. Wright had been an immeasurable help.

Indeed I had wanted to improve my Sanskrit and general knowledge to the point that I could make the Gopāla-campū "my own." To my mind, it should have been that I knew my work in the same way that a virtuoso knows his Violin Concerto. But I was light years away from that kind of mastery and it embarrassed me to say anything at that point, and so I let my thesis remain unpublished. It was rather like a violinist who aims at mastering Paganini but finds that an elusive if not impossible goal. So how can he perform?

There seemed to be other problems as well. After all, it was not just the Gopāla-campū that needed mastery. The entire corpus of Jiva Goswami's work was still outside my reach. After all, I hadn't really dived into his knowledge-world, not having gone through the entirety of the Sandarbhas thoroughly. Actually, it seemed as if I had done nothing thoroughly. I was afflicted with self-doubt and decided to leave it at that time. I had a post-doctoral award at the University of Toronto, during which time I was supposed to complete the translation, but that too never happened. Other concerns weighed on me and my lack of direction resulted in my academic career evaporating. Looking back on it now, when I still feel even more acutely the distance that lies between me and Jiva Goswami, one I have failed to cross due to a lack of  spiritual ambition more than material. And I say that even as I know and admit the sheer impossibility of such a task. If anything, my association with Satyanarayana Dasaji at the Jiva Institute is another fortuitous occurrence in this ongoing attempt to achieve an impossible goal.

While at SOAS, I was also inspired to start the Gaudiya Grantha Mandir project. Peter Schreiner introduced me to computerized text analysis and I saw the research potential for cross-linking texts and conceived of the idea of a searchable corpus of critically edited texts related specifically to Gaudiya Vaishnavism. What I wanted to do was to produce an on-line literary facsimile of the Vrindavan Goswamis' "knowledge world." After all, if I could not enter that world fully, then how could I enter Jiva Goswami's mind? Naturally, one of the first books that I typed out was Gopāla-campū.

So now the stars have suddenly aligned in various ways to make it apparent that it is now or never. I don't really care any more whether my thesis has any academic merit or not. In terms of the ideal understanding of the phenomena that Jiva Goswami is talking about, I seem to be as far now as I ever was. And indeed there is enough work still left to do, despite all  these lost intervening years.

When I was granted the Commonwealth Scholarship to do my doctorate in the UK, I was asked to list the universities where I would like to study. Oxford and Cambridge are the UK's most prestigious universities, and a degree from Oxford has more value than degrees from most of the world's universities. The Commonwealth Scholarship covered university fees and living costs for three years, so it was the best deal for me. Even though I was accepted into Chicago, I would not have been able to afford the cost of living there. For some reason, I made the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies my first choice. SOAS was quite eager to have me, even though I had most likely been influenced in my decision by the thought that I was unworthy of Oxford. I was very encouraged by Prof. Wright's enthusiastic welcoming letter.

He told me what I did not know at the time, namely that Ramdas Gupta of SOAS had taken a team of Indologists, most prominently Tarapada Mukherjee and J.C. Wright himself, to help him in the creation of the Vrindavan Research Institute. When I arrived in London, Prof. Wright had already arranged for microfilm of all relevant manuscripts from the VRI to be made available to me, and later  on when I requested further photocopies, I received them all at no cost and no trouble. Anyone trying to get that amount of material from VRI will know that this was a tremendous break. The result was that in the four years I worked on my doctorate, I never came to India. A bit silly really, I should have come anyway, but those were my "not in India" and "in England" years.

So here it is 25 years later and I literally live around the corner from the Vrindavan Research Institute. When the people there realized that I had this unpublished thesis based primarily on manuscript materials from their institution, they told me that they had money available for publications and would I like to offer it to them. Naturally, it seemed like a perfect opportunity. This time, I feel that publication with VRI will help to create a bond between the Jiva Institute and VRI. We are even considering making this publication a joint VRI-Jiva project. At the present however I am going through the manuscript and hoping that I can stop myself from getting so involved in the subject matter, revisiting the whole thing in such a way that it takes me another four years of work to finish it. But that temptation will be there as I can already see after working on the first chapter.

The fact is that the Gopāla-campū is an extremely challenging work and when I read it now, I still do not find it always easy to understand. Each verse requires attention. There are other auxiliary projects (besides Grantha Mandir) that I felt were intimately connected to the work, one being a translation and commentary on Jiva Goswami's very last work, Saṅkalpa-kalpa-druma, which gives Jiva's poetic vision of the nitya-līlā. It is my saṅkalpa to do that, it is a bit down the list, but hopefully I can get that done too. That will still come before finishing the translation. I think the GC translation is going to have to be my final act in this world.

I have some other things to say about the transition in projects from Bhaktivinoda Thakur to this, which are more than just two worlds, but two worlds that intersect with my own phenomenal reality in a particular way. I will reflect on that in a minute.