Abstract
This lecture is an intellectual history of the self-published journals of the avant-garde jazz musician and spiritual guru Alice Coltrane, also known as Swamini Turiyasangitananda. In these meditations, she received messages from realms beyond (turīya) and displayed them in sound and word. The journals also reveal an autodidact capable in Sanskrit and Hindi and an informed reader engaging with specific religious texts. In this talk, I am interested in Coltrane as Turiyasangitananda – that is, as a self-ordained monastic leader and an independent artist, thinking creatively at the nexus of metaphysical religion, modern Indian spirituality, and the Black radical tradition. Through a close reading of her book Divine Revelations (1995) and other ephemera from her Sai Anantam Ashram, I provide detail into the South Asian forms of knowledge that Turiyasangitananda molded into her “freedom dreams.”
Biography
Anand Venkatkrishnan is an intellectual historian of South Asian religion. His first book, Love in the Time of Scholarship: The Bhāgavata Purāṇa in Indian Intellectual History, explores how popular religion shaped the everyday lives of Sanskrit scholars in early modern India. It shows that the vernacular-language, quotidian practices of bhakti reshaped writing in elite systems of Sanskrit learning.
He is at work on two additional research projects. The first, Searching for Sarasvati, is an alternative history of American Indology that focuses on those written out of its past and present. Engaging with classical Sanskrit literature, gender and sexuality studies, African American history, and Asian American studies, it explores the question of whether how you live matters to how you read. The other, Left-Hand Practice, concerns a group of loosely affiliated religious intellectuals in modern India involved with the political left. Each, in their own way, articulated a critique of modernist, bourgeois Hinduism.
Venkatkrishnan's lecture is sponsored by the Liu Institute's South Asia Group. The event is free and open to the public.