TY - JOUR AU - John Fahy PY - 2014/12/22 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Between Heaven and a Hard Place: Inhabiting the Space Between an Enchanted Past and a Utopian Future JF - The Unfamiliar JA - unfamiliar VL - 4 IS - 1 SE - ESSAYS I DO - 10.2218/unfamiliar.v4i1.1113 UR - http://journals.ed.ac.uk/unfamiliar/article/view/1113 AB - This essay looks at how devotees of Krishna in Mayapur, West Bengal experience the space between an ideal past and a prophesied future. Through an affective and imaginative engagement with Vaishnav cultural history, devotees learn to relocate themselves in a particular temporal flow, within which both the past and future become constitutive horizons of the ethical imagination. I will focus on how the tradition of katha (storytelling) facilitates a convergence of temporalities, within which devotees are encouraged to routinely participate in the past. Such engagement with an enchanted past, I will argue, in turn informs devotees’ imaginings of and aspirations for the ongoing development of an ‘Ideal Vedic City’. ER -