Hindi Translation of Jack Hawley's Krishna's Playground

In February, 2023 Rajkamal Prakashan of Delhi published a Hindi translation of Jack Hawley’s 2020 book Krishna’s Playground: Vrindavan in the 21st Century. The Hindi title is Kṛṣṇa kī Līlābhūmi: 21vīṅ Sadī meṅ Vṛndāvan and the translator is Ashok Kumar. With this, Hawley hopes to make his words and thoughts accessible in the language where many of his interviews and encounters took place. A book launch chaired by Purushottam Agrawal, editor of Rajkamal’s Bhakti Mīmāṃsā series, and mentored by Shrivatsa Goswami, took place in Vrindavan itself.

Vrindavan is the place most closely associated with the god Krishna. It is here that he is believed to have spent his youth and adolescence—a wilderness of primordial appeal, a land of love. These days, however, Vrindavan’s special identity is deeply challenged by the pollution of the Yamuna River, on which it was built, and a construction boom that makes it increasingly an appendage of megalopolitan Delhi. Other major transformations are threatened. Can it still be Vrindavan?