Religion

Viṭṭhal, also called Viṭhobā, is the most popular god in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, and the best-known Hindu god of that region outside of India. This book, presented here in English translation, is the foremost study of the history of Viṭṭhal, his worship, and his worshipers. First published in Marathi in 1984, this work remains the most thorough and insightful work on Viṭṭhal and his cult in any language, and provides an exemplary model for understanding the history and morphology of lived Hinduism. Viṭṭhal exemplifies the synthesis of Vaiṣṇava and Śaiva elements that not only typifies Maharashtrian Hindu religious life but also marks his resemblance to another prominent South Indian god, Veṅkateś of Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh. The author's analysis highlights Viṭṭhal's connection with pastoralist hero cults, and demonstrates the god's development from a god of shepherds to a god of the majority of the population, including Brāhmaṇs. One chapter displays the feminine side of Viṭṭhal, his role as “Mother,” and another explores the efforts of various Brāhmaṇ adherents of Viṭṭhal to give his cult a Sanskritic, or even Vedic, sheen. In addition to these elements of Hindu traditions, Dhere also explores the connections of Viṭṭhal with Buddhist and Jain traditions.

Shivaji was a noble and virtuous hero from 17th-century western India. His legend is well known and has been retold, in several different versions, as it serves as an important part of Hindu nationalist ideology. His legend expresses deeply held convictions about what Hinduism is, and how it is opposed to Islam. Through presenting specific points about the similarities of themes and the contexts in which this legend has been set, this book traces the origin and development of the Shivaji legend, examining its meaning for those who have composed and read it, and paints a complex picture of the past four centuries of national identity, awareness of themes present during colonization, the influence of an author's experience in his narrations, and, most importantly, Hindu-Muslim relations.

This is the first full‐length study of the devotional poetry and poetics of the fourteenth‐century poet–philosopher Vedåntadeóika, one of the most outstanding and influential figures in the Hindu tradition of àrâ‐Vaióïavism (the cult of Lord Vishnu and his consort Lakómâ or àrâ), a tradition that affirms both vernacular Tamil poems of ninth‐ and tenth‐century saint‐poets (the Çôvårs) and the Sanskrit Vedas as an Ubhaya or “dual” Vedånta. Long after his death, Vedåntadeóika was claimed as the founding Çcårya (sectarian preceptor) of the Vaìakalai or “Northern School” of àrâvaióïavism, associated with the holy city of Kåñcâpuram.

Singing the Body of God is a comparative study of the Sanskrit, Prakãit, and Tamil poems composed by Vedåntadeóika in praise of important Vaióïava shrines and their icons – poems that are considered to be the apogee of South Indian devotional literature. This book examines the varied ways in which Vedåntadeóika, the philosopher and logician, works his thought through the distinctive – at times antithetical – medium of the poem. It also gives particular attention to the poems’ emotional and visionary center of gravity: the different temple images of Lord Vishnu, referred to by the poet simply as the various “lovely bodies” of God. Singing the Body of God brings to light a unique example of the creative synthesis of the Sanskrit and Tamil traditions in Medieval Tamil Nadu, and makes an important contribution to our understanding of intellectual and religious vernacularism and “cosmopolitanism” in pre‐modern South Asia.

This collection presents 145 brief Bengali lyric poems dedicated to the Hindu goddesses Kālī and Umā. The poems — many of which are presented here for the first time in English translation — were written from the early eighteenth century up to the contemporary period. They represent the unique Bengali tradition of goddess worship (Śāktism) as it developed over this period. The author's lucid introduction places these works in their historical context and shows how images of the goddesses evolved over the centuries. The lively translations of these poetic lyrics evoke the passion and devotion of the followers of Kālī and Umā and shed light on the history and practice of goddess worship.

“The poem is rising into splendid popularity. Some say it is better than Milton — but that is all bosh — nothing can be better than Milton; many say it licks Kalidasa; I have no objection to that. I don't think it impossible to equal Virgil, Kalidasa, and Tasso.” Michael Madhusudan Datta wrote this in a letter to a friend about his verse narrative, The Slaying of Meghanada (1861). The epic, a Bengali version of the Ramayana story in which Ravana, not Rama, is the hero, has become a classic of Indian literature. Datta lived in Bengal at the height of what is frequently called the Bengal Renaissance, a time so labeled for its reinvigoration and reconfiguration of the Hindu past and for the florescence of the literary arts. It was also a period when the Bengali city of Kolkata was a center of world trade-the second city of the British empire — and thus a site of cultural exchange between India and the West. Datta was the perfect embodiment of this time and place. The Slaying of Meghanada is deeply influenced by western epic tradition, and is sprinkled with nods to Homer, Milton, and Dante. Datta's deft intermingling of western and eastern literary traditions brought about a sea change in South Asian literature, and is generally considered to mark the dividing line between pre-modern and modern Bengali literature. Datta's masterpiece is now accessible to readers of English in this translation, which captures both the sense and the spirit of the original. The poem is supplemented by an extensive introduction, notes, and a glossary.

This book offers a cultural biography of a south Indian poet—Srinatha, who lived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the area of today’s Andhra Pradesh and who composed in Telugu, one of the great classical languages of India with a literary tradition of a thousand years. Srinatha is arguably the most creative figure in the entire history of Telugu literature and one of the great voices in South Asian literature generally. He revolutionized the nature of literary composition in Telugu and, in effect, invented the classic format of the sustained, well-integrated, thematically coherent Telugu book. He bridged the gap between oral and written composition in Telugu by creating a “second-order” orality; and he combined in highly creative ways the classical Sanskrit world of erudition and poetic precedent with an entirely local, Telugu reality. A figure larger than life, he is emblematic of a moment of profound cultural change and experimentation in south India, and he lives on in a rich tradition of stories and poetic imitations (discussed at length in the final chapter of the book). Defining himself as an “emperor of poets,” he in effect generated a notion of Andhra as a cultural zone as well as a model for the large-scale political empire of Vijayanagara that came into being in the fifteenth century.

This book considers the ritualized poetic construction of male identity in the R̥gveda, India’s oldest Sanskrit text, and argues that an important aspect of early Vedic life involves the sustained promotion and embodiment of what it means to be a true man. The R̥gveda contains over a thousand hymns to primarily three gods: the deified ritual Fire, Agni, the war-god Indra, and the sacred beverage sóma. The hymns were sung in daylong fire rituals in which poet-priests prepared the sacred drink in order to empower Indra. The dominant image of Indra is that of a highly glamorized, violent, and powerful Āryan male and the three gods represents the ideals of manhood. R̥gvedic poet-priests employ various poetic and performative strategies, some explicit, others less so, in order to construct their masculine ideology as normative, while justfymg it as the most valid way for men to live. For example, Poet-priests naturalize this ideology by encoding it within a man’s sense of his body and physical self. R̥gvedic ritual rhetoric and practices thus encode specific male roles, especially the role of man as warrior, while embedding these roles in a complex network of social, economic, and political relationships.

This book is the English translation of Sugata Saurabha, a poetic rendering of the Buddha's life, published in 1947 in the Nepalese language, Newari, by Chittadhar Hrdaya, one of the greatest literary figures from Nepal in the twentieth century. Sugata Saurabha (“The Fragrant Life of the Buddha”) is a remarkable text for its comprehensiveness, artistry, and nuance. Remarkably, this work was composed while Chittadhar was jailed for five years for the crime of publishing a poem in his native language. Sugata Saurabha covers the Buddha's life from birth to enlightenment to death, according to the classical sources, and conveys his basic teachings with simple clarity and narrative subtlety. What makes this nineteen-chapter epic of additional interest is the author's insertions, where the classical sources are silent, of details on the Buddha's life and sociocultural context that are Nepalese. The effect is to humanize the founder and add the texture of real-life detail. A third level of artistry is the modernist perspective that underlies the poet's manner of retelling this great spiritual narrative. This rendering from the Kathmandu Valley, in a long line of accounts of the Buddha's life dating back almost two thousand years, may be the last ever written in the tradition of Indic classic poetry (kāvya). Sugata Saurabha provides an aesthetically pleasing and doctrinally sound comprehensive account of the Buddha's life and is of interest to Buddhist devotees and suitable for classroom use.

Is “Hinduism” a legitimate term for the widely varying religious practices of India that are commonly called by that name? The appearance of “religion” as a category comprising a set of practices and beliefs allegedly found in every culture dates from the modern period, emerging as Europe expanded trade abroad and established its first colonial relations in the 17th and 18th centuries. Hinduism emerged in the encounter between modernity’s greatest colonial power, Great Britain, and the jewel of her imperial crown, India. Around the turn of the 19th century, officials of the British colonial state and Christian missionaries helped cement the idea that regional and sectarian traditions in India possessed a sufficient coherence to be construed as a single, systematic religion. This encounter was deeply shaded by the articulation and development of the concept of “religion”, and it produced the now common idea that Hinduism is a unified religion. The Bengal Presidency, home of Calcutta — capital of colonial India and center of economic gravity in the eastern hemisphere — emerged as the locus of ongoing and direct contact between Indians and colonial officials, journalists, and missionaries. Drawing on a large body of previously untapped literature, including documents from the Church Missionary Society and Bengali newspapers, this book presents a portrait of the process by which “Hinduism” came into being. It argues against the common idea that the modern construction of religion in colonial India was simply a fabrication of Western Orientalism and missionaries. Rather, it involved the active agency and engagement of Indian authors who interacted, argued, and responded to British authors over key religious issues such as image-worship, satī, tolerance, and conversion. This book retells the story of Christians’ and Hindus’ reception of each other in the early 19th century in a way that takes seriously the power of their religious worldviews to shape the encounter itself and help produce the very religions that colonialism thought it “discovered”. While post-colonial theory can illuminate issues of power and domination, the history of religions reminds us of the continuing importance of the sacred and spiritual dimensions of the peoples under colonial rule.