Fwd: Release of book 'Vaikunta Perumal Temple, Kanchipuram' by Dennis Hudson
vj kumar
"The upper sanctum of the temple originally housed a venerated image of Vishnu. Following the tenth-century conquest of the region by the Badami Chalukya dynasty, this statue was removed and lost. However, Prof. Hudson’s explication of the sculptured panels on the first level of the temple revealed that one of these panels is a representation of the missing statue. On a visit to Kanchipuram in 2003, he was surprised to learn that devotees had begun to worship this newly identified representation. How many of us have had the good fortune literally to discover God for others?"
read on....
Romila Thapar releases the book "Vaikunta Perumal Temple Kanchipuram" as interpreted by D.Dennis Hudson and gives the Dennis Hudson memorial lecture on "Cyclical and Linear time in ancient India" 6 pm Kalakshetra, Thiruvanmiyur Chennai on 7th January 2010. All are welcome.
www.prakritifoundation.com
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Residence: S. Swaminathan
D. Dennis Hudson (16 Feb. 1938 – 10 Dec. 2006), Emeritus Professor of World Religions at Smith College and one of the foremost American scholars of the religions of India, was born in Long Beach, California, and grew up in Lomita, the son of Lisle McClellan and Dean B. Hudson, a dock worker in the oil industry and a chicken farmer. As a boy, Dennis worked on the farm candling eggs, and he became the more studious of the four Hudson brothers – Bruce, Dennis, Neal, and Marvin – and as Neal explains, “We were all raised with a strong work ethic and to argue our point of view. Most of our evening meals (we always ate dinner as a family) were spent arguing some issue. Dennis and Pop usually going at it.”
The brothers were given the option to quit piano lessons after a six month stint, but Dennis continued and later played the organ, sang, and became quite active in the Lomita Presbyterian Church. He was considering a vocation in the ministry and won a scholarship that allowed him to attend Oberlin College in Ohio. Life and thought at Oberlin were more expansive than he had experienced in California, and this strengthened his commitment to pacifism and to issues of racial, social, and religious equality. He became active among the Quakers at Oberlin and was for several years clerk of the Oberlin Friends Meeting, which had an established record of protest against discrimination, execution, and war. Dennis married Barbara Johnson of Clinton, New York, just before graduating from Oberlin in 1960 with a degree in History.
From 1960 to 1962 Hudson held an Oberlin Shansi Teaching Fellowship in Madurai, India, where he taught English at the American College for Men and Lady Doak College for Women and directed the Lady Doak Choir. There his interest in Indian religions deepened, and he received an M.A. in Church History from Oberlin in 1964. During this period Dennis and Barbara had a daughter Megan, now a doctor of chiropractic in Florence, Massachusetts, and shortly afterward a son David, currently a vice president with Turner Broadcasting TNT/TBS in Los Angeles.
In 1964 Hudson entered the School of Religion at Claremont Graduate University, where he studied Tamil and began work toward his Ph.D. After teaching Religion for two years at the University of California at Santa Barbara, he won both a Kent Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship to study in India from 1967 to 1969, and he took the family to Madras (now Chennai), India, where he became fluent in Tamil as he continued to explore the interactions of religions in India, especially in the Tamil cultural regions of South India. His Ph.D. research into the development of Indian Protestant Christianity was published in 2000 as Protestant Origins in India: Tamil Evangelical Christians, 1706-1835.
In connection with his research in Madras, Dennis further developed a relationship, begun in Madurai, with a family of Tamil Christians, especially N.R.D. Ezekiel (known within the family as Babu), his wife Vatsala, her older sister Angela Richard, her younger sister Priscilla Christodoss (known within the family as Jigumma), and Priscilla’s husband Christodoss Kannappa. The sisters are descendants of a prominent Tamil Christian court musician, and their family were leaders of Christian music in Tamil Nadu. Over the years Dennis came to be considered a member of this family, even to the extent that he later played a role interviewing and helping to approve the selection of husbands for the next generation.
After spending the 1969-1970 academic year at the Center for World Religions at Harvard, studying Sanskrit and completing his dissertation, Hudson accepted a position teaching the history of religions in India at Smith College, and he became a popular teacher and mentor to students throughout the Five College area.
Dennis and Barbara were divorced in 1975. Several years later he met Lori Divine, the sister of a Smith colleague, who was then living in Berkeley, California. After an energetic transcontinental courtship, Lori moved east, and they were married in 1981. They have two children – Jacob, a graduate of Wesleyan University now working for Atlas Holdings LLC in Greenwich, Connecticut, and Alexa, currently a student at Wesleyan. In 1994 Dennis converted to Judaism, adding further richness to the religious and cultural milieu of the family.
Throughout his career Professor Hudson published over forty articles on the wide range of topics within the scope of his expertise. He wrote on the early medieval Alvar poets, on Nayanar hagiography, on the nineteenth-century Saiva reformer Arumuga Navalar, on Hindu worship and festivals, and on the Buddhist poem Manimekalai. A brief listing of the titles to some of his articles and papers not only gives a sense of the range of Prof. Hudson’s thinking, but also perhaps provides a glimpse into the kind of person he was: “A New Year’s Poem for Krishna,” “The Uses of Delusion: Conflicts between Religions in Ancient India,” “Protestant Faith as Tamil Bhakti,” “The Courtesan and Her Bowl,” “How to Worship at Siva’s Temple,” “A Hindu Response to the Written Torah,” “Madurai: The City as Goddess,” “Violent and Fanatical Devotion Among the Nayanars,” “Pinnai, Krishna’s Cowherd Wife,” “Self Sacrifice as Truth,” “By Monkey or by Cat: How is One Saved?” and, in true Hudsonian form, “Feeding the Gods.”
While co-teaching with Marylin M. Rhie in 1979 a course on temples, sculpture, and their corresponding literary texts, Prof. Hudson was drawn to a poem by Tirumangai Alvar, a ninth-century king turned saint and poet, about the building of the eighth-century Vaikunta Perumal Temple – which the poet called Parameccuravinnagaram – dedicated to the Lord Vishnu in Kanchipuram, Tamil Nadu. Prof. Hudson came to realize that these verses help explain, and in turn are illuminated by, the architecture of the temple and the sculptured panels adorning its walls. Together these verses and carvings outline the history of the Pallava dynasty that built the temple. Hudson’s subsequent years of research, including a second Fulbright Fellowship in 1983 and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 1988, resulted in a remarkable nexus of scholarship and religious practice beyond the metaphoric walls of academe. The upper sanctum of the temple originally housed a venerated image of Vishnu. Following the tenth-century conquest of the region by the Badami Chalukya dynasty, this statue was removed and lost. However, Prof. Hudson’s explication of the sculptured panels on the first level of the temple revealed that one of these panels is a representation of the missing statue. On a visit to Kanchipuram in 2003, he was surprised to learn that devotees had begun to worship this newly identified representation. How many of us have had the good fortune literally to discover God for others?
Prof. Hudson was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in 1996, and he retired from teaching in 2000 in order to concentrate on writing a full account of his research. In 2004 he was asked by Indian scholars and patrons to produce a guide book to the Vaikunta Perumal Temple. Originally conceived as a short, illustrated introduction to the temple, this project grew into a four-hundred page interpretation that is about to be published in India. During his final months Prof. Hudson continued to work assiduously to complete both this and a more extended study, The Body of God: Text, Imagery, and Liturgy in the Vaikunta Perumal Temple of 8th-Century Kanchipuram, which will be published by Oxford University Press. The eminent Indian historian Romila Thapar sums up his work on Hinduism in terms that reveal Prof. Hudson for the scholar that he was: “Dennis Hudson has spent a lifetime in the study of Hinduism and more particularly, the Bhagavata tradition. His studies are not only carefully researched but also draw on an impressive knowledge of Hindu belief and practice, derived from his readings of Sanskrit and Tamil texts and from his fieldwork. His forthcoming book, The Body of God, is a pioneering work where analyses of religion, history and art intersect.”
Notwithstanding the long days and years of research, teaching, and scholarship, the focal point of Dennis’s life was love of his family, and this was always evident in the joy he took in his life with Lori, in the growth of all his children, and in his delight at their varied approaches to their own lives. Dennis loved company and, following family tradition, he greatly enjoyed spirited conversation and debate, especially when it could be shared over a meal. Cooking was a great pleasure to him, and he did so with an unassuming flair and enviable ease acquired from his mother. His invitation, “Why don’t you stay for dinner; we’re just having leftovers,” would be followed not so much by a meal as by a repast and an experience. Prefaced by an explanation of each dish, dining proceeded to the accompaniment of an often wide-ranging discussion moderated by Dennis in such a way that everyone contributed and everyone learned something. He was as natural a teacher as he was a cook. With characteristic ease, and with great good humor, Dennis and Lori created a remarkable sense of community in their home. The door to their house was always open to friends, visitors, students, and travelers from just about everywhere. One never knew upon entering who else might be there, but everyone was welcomed comfortably into a family defined not by birth but by an inclusive thoughtfulness, care, and love.
— John K. Bollard
