Thick Signs: Amplifying God-Sensation in Vrindavan

The divine currency of Radha-Krishna, the couple god, travels across the sacred geography of the Braj in northern India via a robust sign economy. In this article, I draw from my ethnographic narratives to demonstrate three domains of sign-form generation of the name-words of Radha-Krishna: visual, aural/verbal, and ritual/performative. I argue that an elaborate sign economy is required to sustain an intangible God-sensation by translating it into palpable, mundane, earthly forms. Not only does the sign-form thrive as a fusion between the real and the sign, but it also strengthens and comes to mirror the God-intuition in the hearts of the devotee public. This endless, repetitive, creative sign economy constitutes what I call “thick signs”: indelible, weighty, dense, sticky sign-forms that imbue the physical world with a significant layer of divine currency that forms a pathway for intensified God-sensation that keeps God alive in the mundane, earthly world.