Singing the Archive: Versification as Preservation and Pedagogy

Reconstructing the histories of Hindu religious traditions requires navigating a central tension between static, institutional archives and the spontaneous religious expressions they attempt to capture and document. This paper examines the evolution of the fagvā, a prayer uttered by female devotees of the Svāmīnārāyaṇa Saṃpradāya that was later codified into verse. I first engage with questions of loss and preservation through versification to argue that it functioned as a deliberate technology of both preservation and pedagogy. Through ethnographic fieldwork, I explore how the fagvā transcends its textual boundaries through contemporary ritual performance which allows the fagvā to operate as an embodied archive, one which connects and collapses historical time. This paper seeks to reframe the boundaries of the Hindu archive, demonstrating how religious histories are dynamically sustained through the intersection of institutional memory and lived practice.