Bhakti Beyond the Forest: Current Research on Early Modern Religious Literatures in North India 2003-2009

Contents: Preface. I. Constructing Bhakti Communities: 1. The four Sampradayas and other foursomes/John Stratton Hawley. 2. Thematic groupings of Bhakti poetry: the Dadupanth and Sarvangi literature/Dalpat Rajpurohit. 3. Nabhadas Bhaktamal and manuscript culture/James P. Hare. 4. Sainthood revisited: two printed versions of the lives of the eighty-four Vaishnavas by Gokulnath/Galina Rousseva Sokolova. 5. On and around the story of Candrahasa: the transmission of a tale and Bhakti/Yoshifumi Mizuno. II. Bakti and society: 6. Shiva and Parvati Assist Young couples in their marriage as referred to in Hindi devotional literature and folk songs/Teiji Sakata. 7. Devotion rewarded: the attitude towards wealth in the religious literature of medieval Gujarat/Francoise Mallison. III. Ideology: 8. Vaishnava sampradayas on the importance of ritual: a comparison of the two contemporaneous approaches by Vitthalanatha and Jiva Gosvami/Monika Horstmann and Anand Mishra. 9. Jayatrams jogpradipaka: between Hatha-yoga and Bhakti in the eighteenth century/Maya Burger. 10. From Sabda-brahman to sabad: the way from a transpersonal concept to personal experience/Florina Dobre-brat. 11. From ontology to aesthetics: a Bengal Vaishnava interpretation of the upanishadic passage so ham/Koyokazu Okita. IV. Forms: 12. Loving God through Sanskrit Grammar: Jiva Gosvami's use of Krishna's names in Harinamamrta-vyakarana/Rita Jeney. 13. God outside and God inside: north Indian Digambar Jain performance of Bhakti/John E. Cort....Appendix. Index.

This book investigates from a diversity of perspectives how bhakti in general contributed to the formation of early modern literary culture in north India. The eighteen papers presented at the Tenth International Bhakti Conference: Early Modern literatures in North India at Sapientia-Hungarian University of Transylvania, in Miercurea Ciuc, Romania between 22-24 July 2009  address questions on how devotional literature was an important vehicle of community formation and how it dealt with the wider society. They also explore how ideology developed for a religious phenomenon with an emotional appeal, and what were the favoured  linguistic literary or muscial forms of expression for bhakti. (jacket)