Piety in Print: The Vaishnava Periodicals of Colonial Bengal

Abstract

The voluminous corpus of Bengali Vaishnava periodical literature remains largely untapped in scholarship on Bengali Vaishnavism and colonial Hinduism more broadly. This article explores a range of Bengali Vaishnava periodicals from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in order to understand the complex ways in which educated Vaishnavas sought to forge points of convergence for Vaishnava culture within the colonial Bengali public sphere. The ensuing investigation will, it is hoped, demonstrate both the centrality and versatility of the role of the periodical in the broad and multiplex program of Vaishnava retrieval in colonial Bengal.