This paper examines Rūpa Gosvāmin's samādhi at the Rādhā-Dāmodar temple as a site where devotion, inequality, and epistemic power converge. While bhakti theology proclaims that devotion transcends caste, class, and gender, the lived reality at sacred sites in Vṛndāvana reveals enduring hierarchies of access, visibility, and voice. Acts of circumambulation, prostration, and tactile engagement with the sacred unfold across uneven social terrains, where wealthy international pilgrims, impoverished renunciants, and local laborers participate together yet experience vastly different levels of comfort, mobility, and ritual privilege.
As Jon Keune observes in "Shared Devotion, Shared Food" (2021), the bhakti-caste question exposes a central paradox: traditions that proclaim equality before God often reproduce inequality in practice. Building on this insight, the paper situates the Rūpa Gosvāmin samādhi within a devotional landscape where egalitarian ideals coexist with entrenched hierarchies. The refurbished tomb, maintained by institutional actors such as ISKCON, stands in stark contrast to the neglected memorials surrounding it, making material disparity an intrinsic part of the sacred topography. These asymmetries extend to the realm of scholarship, where institutional authority, linguistic privilege, and gender shape whose interpretations of the sacred are legitimized.
By asking whose voices are amplified—temple managers, male priests, and academic interlocutors—and whose remain unheard—women devotees, temple workers, and lay practitioners— the paper shows how bhakti simultaneously challenges and reproduces inequality. Combining ethnography and phenomenological landscape theory, it argues that devotion in Vṛndāvana materializes Keune's paradox: bhakti's promise of equality is both enacted and undone within the lived realities of sacred experience.