\chapter*{Foreword}
\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Foreword by John Stratton Hawley}
\markboth{Rādhāvallabha Songbook}{Foreword}

The strong relationship between music and religion is well known to
millions of the world's citizens—people who belong to a host of
contrasting religious traditions.  Some of these religions go so far
as to take a stand against the power of the tie between religion and
music, aiming to rescue the holy word from the vanities, distractions,
and deformities that might pollute it if allowed a musical
manifestation.  When a religion embarks on a sonoclastic campaign of
this sort, however, that effort only serves to underscore the strength
of the connection that is sought to be dismantled.  One of the ongoing
embarrassments of the field of Religious Studies is that we represent
this bond so feebly in the classroom.  All too few Religion
departments have a course called “Religion and Music” or some variant
of that title.  Yet every department should, and Guy Beck, taking a
single religious tradition as his example, shows us why.

What you have in hand isn't a book, really, but a library—a library of
sound.  The musical samples that accompany the text represent one of India's
great musical traditions, and they do so with a fidelity that no
written document could possibly match; a complete set of eighteen CDs
is available by subscription.  In the pages and disks that comprise
{\it Vaishnava Temple Music in Vrindaban}, Beck, whose musical sensitivities
have been honed in long years of performing the vocal repertoire of
north India, underscores the powerful bond between word and sound that
is an article of faith in the worship of Krishna.  Those connected to
Vrindaban affirm that {\it bhakti}, participation in a life with God,
can hardly exist without {\it bhajan}, devotional song.  These two
words, in fact, are formed from a single Sanskrit root.  Beck presents
here the mutual resonance between {\it bhakti} and {\it bhajan} as it
is performed by a particular religious community within the complex
that makes up Vrindaban's whole—a community that traces its history to
the time when Vrindaban's distinctive religious culture took shape in
the early years of the sixteenth century.  Adherents of the
Rādhāvallabha Sampradāya believe they stand at the epicenter of the
relationship between {\it bhakti} and {\it bhajan}, since they eschew
from ritual performance any aspect of human experience that cannot
take its place in the charmed circle that forms around the love
exchanged between Krishna and Rādhā.  Rādhāvallabhis therefore insist
that they are the bearers of a musical style—{\it samāj gāyan}—as
distinctive as the charmed circle itself.

In the early years of the eighteenth century the great king Jai Singh
II, ruler of Amer and Jaipur and a key figure in the administration of
the Mughal empire, urged that the Rādhāvallabha community join forces
with a pan-sectarian effort designed to align the Vaishnava
theological traditions of north India with what he took to be the
overarching history of Vaishnava religion in India as a whole.  They,
like Vrindaban's other {\it sampradāyas}, were expected to claim a
prior lineage that would connect them to one of the theological
traditions established in south India well before the sixteenth
century, or to show that their doctrines were based on Vedic
fundamentals as transmitted in the {\it Brahma-sūtras}, the Upaniṣads,
and the {\it Bhagavad-gītā}.  Other {\it sampradāyas} connected to
Vrindaban and the Braj region acceded to this demand—some, indeed, may
have inspired it—but the most important Rādhāvallabhī spokesman at the
time, Rūplāl Gosvāmī, refused to go along.  He seems to have believed
that the special magic of Vrindaban, Krishna's paradigmatic place,
ought not to be diluted by canons pertaining to any external
agency—even Vedic, Vaishnava ones—just as Krishna himself should not
be subordinated to any other deity, even Vishnu himself.  Here was a
supremely confident, inwardly concentrated theological and musical
tradition that felt it did not have to compromise with the demands of
state.
\begin{sloppypar}
It was a dramatic moment, and had dramatic consequences.  For a time,
we are told, Rūplāl and the central leadership of the Rādhāvallabha
Sampradāya had to withdraw from the Vrindavan it so cherished.  But
they retained the truest Vrindaban, Krishna's own Vrindaban, in their
liturgy.  In the text that follows and in the recorded music that
accompanies it, Guy Beck does a superb job of conveying this deeply
devoted Rādhāvallabhī spirit to those of us who stand outside the
charmed circle that its songs are intended to evoke.  He offers us an
invitation to enter.
\bigskip
\end{sloppypar}
\noindent John Stratton Hawley\\
Barnard College, Columbia University
