page_title: It Is 'He' (Jai Sri Krishna)
section_title: Aftermath and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: It Is 'He' (Jai Sri Krishna) / Aftermath and legacy
caption_attribution_description: George Harrison, Shyamasundara Dasa and Mukunda Goswami in Vrindavan in front of Jiva Goswami Samadhi
context_page_description: "It Is 'He' (Jai Sri Krishna)" is a song by English musician George Harrison, released as the final track of his 1974 album Dark Horse. Harrison was inspired to write the song while in the Hindu holy city of Vrindavan, in northern India, with his friend Ravi Shankar. The composition originated on a day that Harrison describes in his autobiography as "my most fantastic experience", during which his party and their ascetic guide toured the city's temples. The song's choruses were adapted from the Sanskrit chant they sang before visiting Seva Kunj, a park dedicated to Krishna's childhood. The same pilgrimage to India led to Harrison staging Shankar's Music Festival from India in September 1974 and undertaking a joint North American tour with Shankar at the end of that year.
  Despite the devotional nature of the song, Harrison wrote it part-way through a period of divergence from the spiritual goals he had espoused in his previous works, particularly Living in the Material World. "It Is 'He'" serves as a rare example of an overtly religious song on Dark Horse.
context_section_description: First published in August 1980, I, Me, Mine contains two pages of description from Harrison on Vrindavan and the story behind "It Is 'He' (Jai Sri Krishna)". This coverage contrasts with little discussion of his years as a member of the Beatles, and typically brief commentary on each of his songs. In the book, Harrison dedicates "It Is 'He'" to Sripad Maharaj, whom he describes as "a wonderful, humble, Holy man".
  
  After 1974, Harrison no longer wrote songs as obviously Krishna-devotional as "It Is 'He' (Jai Sri Krishna)", although he returned to recording bhajans intermittently, with songs such as "Dear One" in 1976 and "Life Itself, released in 1981. In his book The Dawn of Indian Music in the West, Peter Lavezzoli writes that following Dark Horse and the "ill-fated 1974 tour", Harrison "continued to infuse his work with an implicit spirituality that rarely manifested on the surface". Speaking to ISKCON devotee Mukunda Goswami in 1982, Harrison said: 
  Back in the sixties, whatever we were all getting into, we tended to broadcast it as loud as we could. I had had certain realizations and went through a period where I was so thrilled about my discoveries and realizations that I wanted to shout and tell it to everybody. But there's a time to shout it out and a time not to shout it out.
  Having distanced himself from the Hare Krishna movement after Prabhupada's death in 1977 and through the 1980s, Harrison returned to Vrindavan with Mukunda and other devotees in 1996, while in India working on Shankar's album Chants of India. Leng views the latter project as Harrison returning to the musical statements of his Radha Krishna Temple recordings and "It Is 'He' (Jai Sri Krishna)". During the Friar Park sessions for Chants of India, Harrison taped the Indian music portions of his song "Brainwashed", which ends with the Sanskrit prayer "Namah Parvati". Dale Allison comments that it was not until the release of this chanted mantra, issued posthumously in 2002, that Harrison again made such an "explicit statement" of Hindu religiosity as he had on "It Is 'He'".
caption: Harrison (left), with his Hare Krishna friends Shyamasundar Das and Mukunda Goswami, in Vrindavan in 1996
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