The wisdom that those who know the truth do not speak it could not describe the interests of the rasikas, the connoisseurs of art who are fascinated by Krishna, the Hindu cowherd god of charm and love. In two years of fieldwork studying with retired aesthetics professor C. B. Rawat and going to temples to hear ritual love poetry in the North Indian town of Braj, A. Whitney Sanford participated in the interactive art of devotional “ideal listening” (p. 3). Paramānand, a sixteenth-century figure in the Hindi Aṣṭachāp (eight names) group of poets of the Vallabh Sampradāy, takes center stage in Sanford's study as a speaker of aesthetic truth. The scriptural basis for Paramānand's poems (padas) can be attributed to Krishna's own words in the Bhagavad Gītā, “enlightening one another and conversing about me continuously, they are satiated and they feel rapturous love” (see Graham Schweig, Bhagavad Gītā: The Beloved Lord's Secret Love Song [San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2007], 139). In her exploration of daily and seasonal cycles of poetry that nourish this love, Sanford's Singing Krishna: Sound Becomes Sight in Paramānand's Poetry illuminates works such as Diana Eck's Darśan: Seeing the Divine Image in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) for anyone who wonders how spiritual hearing facilitates darśan in a specific religious tradition.

Through knowledge of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and similar literatures that tell the story of Krishna's earthly career, the rasikas of Braj understand Paramānand's oeuvre as a window into the spiritual world, although employing seemingly mundane images. Like the more famous Aṣṭachāp poet Sūrdas and the Indian practice of later authors attributing their work to earlier luminaries, Paramānand's legacy, too, “has grown steadily, drop by drop, over the centuries” so that there may be more than one Paramānand, but devotees are far more concerned with the emotional impact of the poems, which they recite and hear while viewing elaborately staged altar images of Krishna (see John Stratton Hawley, Sūr Dās: Poet, Singer, Saint [Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984], 36). By focusing on Paramānand, Sanford's contribution expands our understanding of the Aṣṭachāp genre, illustrating Kenneth E. Bryant's observation that in Indian aesthetics, “the artist's experience is a mystic one [and conversely] the mystic's experience is also aesthetic” (see Poems to the Child God: Structure and Strategies in the Poetry of Sūrdās [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978], 25).

The connoisseurs of Aṣṭachāp literary art also join the mystic with the aesthetic. The goal of Paramānand's followers is to participate in a progression of vicarious experiences originating with the mythical devotees portrayed in the scriptures, illustrated by the poet, and finally influencing their own feelings for Krishna as they submit to verbal manipulations in the imaginative and sensual “theater of memory,” for learned rasikas are perpetually reminded of the totality of Krishna lore (p. 42). Singing Krishna will be recognized as a standard work for scholars of the Aṣṭachāp poets interested in an interpretive reading, while its practical definition of conventional terms borrowed from the earlier foundation of Indian aesthetics makes the darśan concept accessible to a more general audience.

The more learned the devotee in Krishna lore, the more sophisticated and profound her “foundational emotional experiences” (bhāvas) become, leading further into ascending stages of love (p. 18). Paramānand's metaphors, such as Krishna as a treasure of rasa—taste—help to “create a conceptual framework that structures the devotee's thought process and thus how each devotee sees” (p. 45). Sound and sight are privileged, but all of the senses are given play. Through passion for Krishna, the poetic thirst of a gopī cowherd girl on a hot North Indian day, for instance, “reflect and communicate those emotional states indicative of the devotee's relationship with Krishna” (p. 24). Feelings of separation and intense desire or thirst to be with Krishna typify the life of the rasika, whose darśan experience is highly individualized and dependent on personal inclinations.

Chapters with titles such as “Afternoon: Experiencing the Food of Love” and “Autumn to Spring: Gopis, Birds, and the Moon” initiate the reader into the darśan experience of Braj as it is portrayed by Paramānand, who brings the devotee into loving union with the compassionate but capricious god. For instance, in the morning, the rasikas hear from a girl who, remembering how the Lord danced the night before, hangs her head and weeps in ecstasy. At night, Krishna's favorite gopī Rādhā is piqued by Krishna's infidelity, and wallowing in her pride, prefers the pangs of separation to reunion—but only for awhile. The audience is likely to identify with Rādhā's friend (sakhī) who endeavors to get Rādhā to see the error of her ways.

Perhaps the greatest significance of Singing Krishna is the spiritual dimension that is added to Sanford's use of the definition of synaesthesia by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson: “understanding and experiencing one thing in terms of another” (Metaphors We Live By [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981], 28). Paramānand's metaphoric language (Krishna as the hero of Cupid's army, or the gopīs as the spoils of war) excites the poetic vision of the rasika. The key to understanding the illusive concept of seeing the sounds of devotion is to be found in the spiritual nourishment extended to the devotee through a unity of the senses and “a unity of meaning within a culture” that makes the experienced practitioner fit to participate in ever more advanced love games with Krishna within herself, where hearing and seeing Krishna merge (p. 27).