{"title":"Religious Reading and Everyday Lives","authors":"Emilia Bachrach","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780199478866.003.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780199478866.003.0021","url":null,"abstract":"Emilia Bachrach paints a vivid ethnographic picture of vārtā satsaṅgs in present-day Ahmadabad—meetings in which female members of the Vallabha Sampraday read and discuss sections of the Sampraday’s two central hagiographies, the Caurāsī vaiṣṇavan kī vārtā and the Do sau bhāvan vaiṣṇavan kī vārtā. Showing how these women use the stories of the saint’s lives to understand and navigate their own social and religious worlds, Bachrach argues that such religious reading practices are an active and productive process, providing a space for debate, interpretation, and exploration of sectarian identity.","PeriodicalId":417009,"journal":{"name":"Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130706456","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Gopal Bhatt","authors":"Shrivatsa Goswami","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780199478866.003.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780199478866.003.0017","url":null,"abstract":"Shrivatsa Goswami examines the ways in which Gopāl Bhaṭṭ, interacting with Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and being a southerner by birth, played a key role in establishing the philosophical perspectives and ritual practices that characterized the new Gaudiya sampradaya being formed at Vrindavan in the first half of the sixteenth century. In doing so, he analyses important features of Gopal Bhatt’s two major works, the Ṣat-Sandarbha (Six Treatises) often mistakenly attributed to Jīva Gosvāmī, and the Haribhaktivilāsa (The Pleasure of Worshiping Hari). It emerges, among other things, that there is an element of mystery as to how Gopāl Bhaṭṭ’s philosophical statements relate to his pronouncements on devotional practice.","PeriodicalId":417009,"journal":{"name":"Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India","volume":"69 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133210645","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Why Do We Still Sift the Husk-Like Upaniṣads?’","authors":"Rembert Lutjeharms","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780199478866.003.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780199478866.003.0020","url":null,"abstract":"Examining the Padyāvalī of the preeminent Gaudiya theologian Rupa Gosvami, Lutjeharms examines how Rupa creatively arranges both religious and non-religious verses by numerous poets into a dissertation that evinces intimate familiarity with Vedanta (particularly Advaita Vedanta), but ultimately establishes bhakti as being superior to Vedanta’s primary object, liberation. Redrawing the lines between Vedanta and Vaishnavism also affords Rupa the opportunity to distinguish Chaitanyaite theology from that of other Vaishnava sects like the Sri Vaishnava Sampraday, which had also wrestled with Vedanta in its own theological literature.","PeriodicalId":417009,"journal":{"name":"Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India","volume":"77 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124998768","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Making Sense of Bhāṣā in Sanskrit","authors":"Samuel Wright","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780199478866.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199478866.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"The movement of material between Sanskrit and the vernacular was by no means unidirectional, as Samuel Wright demonstrates in his analysis of Radhamohan Thakkur’s Mahābhāvānusāriṇī-ṭīkā, a Sanskrit commentary on Bengali devotional poetry. Wright breaks down the techniques employed by Radhamohan in his exegesis of Gaudiya Vaishnava poetry, particularly his use of Sanskrit lexicon in the glossing of Bengali words and his emphasis on the technique of śleṣa (punning). He argues that Radhamohan’s apposition of Sanskrit and the vernacular though such techniques was an attempt not only to show that Sanskrit poetic theory could be used to explain how vernacular poetry ‘works’ (that is, achieves its effects), but also to establish that such vernacular poetry worked as literature, a distinction previously accorded only to Sanskrit.","PeriodicalId":417009,"journal":{"name":"Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127656306","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Emergence of Hindi Literature: From Transregional Maru-Gurjar to Madhyadeśī Narratives","authors":"I. Bangha","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780199478866.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780199478866.003.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Imre Bangha locates the source of what would later become the literary idioms associated with the Hindi heartland—Brajbhasha, Avadhi, Khari Boli, and so on—in Maru-Gurjar, an idiom originating not in the Gangetic plain but in western India, particularly the lands of modern Gujarat and western Rajasthan. Bangha argues that it was this literary language, originally cultivated by Jains beginning in the late twelfth century, that eventually spread to the lands known as madhyadeś, where in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it developed into the forms that we now associate with Brajbhasha and Avadhi. Bangha also reveals that the linguistic and literary evidence for this connection has been apparent for some time, but modern Hindi literary historiography, taking nationalism as its organizing principle and embracing a strict sense of religion as one of the significant boundaries of literary culture, has been largely unable to see it.","PeriodicalId":417009,"journal":{"name":"Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115153382","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘This Is How We Play Holī’","authors":"J. Cort","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780199478866.003.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199478866.003.0010","url":null,"abstract":"John Cort examines phaguā, a type of song associated with the festival of Holi, stressing the role of allegory in north Indian Digambar Jain songs composed in this form. Phaguā was shared by various traditions of Jainism and Hinduism alike, but each tradition put it to quite a distinct use. For Digambar Jains the antinomian transgressions of the Holi festival presented an ethical problem, so their poets adapted the sensual and sexualized phaguā into a metaphorical description of various aspects of the Self and its struggle for spiritual realization. Digambar poets such as Banarasidas and Dhyanatray ‘tamed’ Holi by turning its poetic and musical tradition into a didactic dissertation on discipline, even while retaining the narrative elements (separated lovers, seasonal fecundity, and so on) that were put to more erotic use in other traditions.","PeriodicalId":417009,"journal":{"name":"Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125757045","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Poetics of History in Padmakar’s Himmatbahādurvirudāvalī","authors":"Allison Busch","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780199478866.003.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780199478866.003.0013","url":null,"abstract":"Allison Busch places Padmakar Bhatt and his Himmatbahādurvirudāvalī in the context of the literary and political imaginary of the eighteenth century. She shows how Padmakar inherits the genre of the virudāvalī (itself a multi-faceted tradition) from Sanskrit, but also a rich lexicon from the vernacular, Arabic, and Persian. The form and language of his work thus reflect the changed political and cultural realities of his time. The seamless movement between modes of versified poetic description in the Himmatbahādurvirudāvalī reflects Padmakar’s simultaneous function as both historian and poet.","PeriodicalId":417009,"journal":{"name":"Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India","volume":"132 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125942521","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Poetry in Ragas or Ragas in Poetry?","authors":"R. Sinha","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780199478866.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199478866.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"In this chapter Raman P. Sinha makes a bold effort to uncover broad correlations between the verbal content of poetry that is typically set to music and the ragas in which these poems are performed—not at the level of specific compositions but in regard to a poet’s entire oeuvre. Using standard editions as his base, he deals with padas attributed to four leading Hindi poets of the early modern period: Kabir, Surdas, Mirabai, and Tulsidas. Correlating the life stories of these poets with the musical dimensions of their poetic output, Sinha comes to a number of thought-provoking conclusions. Chief among them is his observation of a reverse relationship between the variety of ragas used and the variety of life situations out of which they arise. In music as in life, finds Sinha, Mirabai and Kabir stand at opposite ends of the spectrum.","PeriodicalId":417009,"journal":{"name":"Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115120153","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Commentary as Translation","authors":"Tyler R Williams","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780199478866.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199478866.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Tyler Williams examines how the monk-poet Bhagvandas, although ostensibly writing a vernacular commentary (ṭīkā) on the Sanskrit Vairāgya Śataka (Hundred Verses on Non-Attachment) of Bhartrihari, in fact adapts the genre of the commentary so as to transform Bhartrihari’s poetic anthology into a religious treatise. In doing so, Bhagvandas gives his audience—the monastic and householder members of the Niranjani Sampraday, as well as members of other devotional sects and even courtly elites—not only access to the Sanskrit original, but also radically transforms that source text in the process.","PeriodicalId":417009,"journal":{"name":"Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126541344","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bhaṭṭs in Braj","authors":"J. Hawley","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780199478866.003.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780199478866.003.0019","url":null,"abstract":"A typical way of referring to the influx of southerners into Braj in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries is to speak of these immigrants as gosvamis, which stresses their liturgical and perhaps institutional roles, but in this chapter John Hawley proposes another lens: the fact that crucial figures among them were Bhatts. Powerful new work by James Benson, Christopher Minkowski, and Rosalind O’Hanlon has focused on reconfigurations that occurred among Bhatt Brahmins in Banaras in the seventeenth century. Hawley attempts to discover similar connections among Bhatts who settled in Braj a century earlier. Their number and individual profiles are impressive: Narayan Bhatt, Sri Bhatt, Kesav Kasmiri Bhatt, Gopal Bhatt, and Vallabh Bhatt—that is, Vallabhacharya.","PeriodicalId":417009,"journal":{"name":"Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India","volume":"56 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129774445","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}