A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s new open access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Hindu devotional traditions have long been recognized for their sacred geographies as well as the sensuous aspects of their devotees' experiences. Largely overlooked, however, are the subtle links between these religious expressions. Based on intensive fieldwork conducted among worshippers in Bengal’s Navadvip-Mayapur sacred complex, this book discusses the diverse and contrasting ways in which Bengal-Vaishnava devotees experience sacred geography and divinity. Sukanya Sarbadhikary documents an extensive range of practices, which draw on the interactions of mind, body, and viscera. She shows how perspectives on religion, embodiment, affect, and space are enriched when sacred spatialities of internal and external forms are studied at once.

This book is less about Sri Vaishnavism as a creed and far more about a modern Sri Vaishnava’s outlook on life. Understanding the ancient Indian spiritual and religious tradition of Sri Vaishnavism can never be complete without some acquaintance with its scriptural literature that is found written mostly in the Sanskrit and native vernacular. In India today, English-educated modern youth, as well as young Indian communities at large in the global diaspora, lacking mastery in either language, completely miss out being able to appreciate and experience life, and the world itself, in the many rare, brilliant and quite “unusual” ways in which their distant ancestors saw it all and recorded their experiences too as scriptural insight. This book is a collection of 18 delightful essays in truly felicitous English, each one of which enables and then vividly brings to life for readers a deep and fresh understanding of the ancestral verities of India.

This is a scholarly book on one of the oldest living religions of India. Tracing the basic tenets of Vaisnavism to the hymns of Rgveda the earliest religious literature of the world, the author has shown how an ancient cult has developed itself by successive stages into a well-formulated monotheistic system in the hands of Ramanuja and his illustrious followers. In the second part of the book the fundamental philosophical theories of Visistadvaita Vedanta are presented to prove that Vaisnavism is not a mere religious cult, but has a credible philosophic foundation.

What role do pre-modern religious traditions play in the formation of modern secular identities? In Unforgetting Chaitanya, Varuni Bhatia examines late-nineteenth-century transformations of Bengali Vaishnavism-a vibrant and multifaceted religious tradition that traces its origins to the fifteenth century Krishna devotee Chaitanya (1486-1533). Drawing on an extensive body of hitherto unexamined archival material, Bhatia finds that both religious modernizers and secular voices among the Bengali middle-class invoked Chaitanya, portraying him simultaneously as a local hero, a Hindu reformer, and as God almighty. She argues that these claims should be understood in relation to the recovery of a "pure" Bengali culture and history in a period of nascent, but rising, anti-colonialism in the region. Who is a true Vaishnava? In the late nineteenth century, this question assumed urgency as debates around questions of authenticity appeared prominently in the Bengali public sphere. These debates went on for years, even decades, causing unbridgeable rifts in personal friendships and tarnishing reputations of established scholars. Underlying these debates was the question of authoritative Bengali Vaishnavism and its role in the long-term constitution of Bengali culture and society. At stake, argues Bhatia, was the very nature and composition of an indigenously-derived modernity inscribed through the politics of authenticity, which allowed an influential section of Hindu, upper-caste Bengalis to excavate their own explicitly Hindu pasts in order to find a people's history, a religious reformer, a casteless Hindu sect, the richest examples of Bengali literature, and a sophisticated expression of monotheistic religion.

Focused on the theme of the sociology of religion, this volume brings together essays by well-known scholars which examine the resurgence of religious identities in the Indian context. The contributors question many received notions, address critical problems, and raise important issues surrounding various current debates./-//-/The papers are divided into four sections. The first deals with religion, society and national identity. The next section is devoted to sects, cults, shrines and the making of traditions. The third section discusses religious conversion, while the last section provides a comparative perspective drawn from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United States. /-//-/Tackling a subject of immense contemporary importance and demonstrating a sensitivity to the shifts and changes brought about in faith, identity and tradition, this volume will be of considerable interest to students of sociology, anthropology, religion, politics and history./-//-/This book is one of the Indian Sociological Society: Golden Jubilee Volumes.

Contributed articles with reference to India.

This book offers a focused examination of the Bengali Vaiṣṇava tradition in its manifold forms in the pivotal context of British colonialism in South Asia. Bringing together scholars from across the disciplines of social and intellectual history, philology, theology, and anthropology to systematically investigate Vaiṣṇavism in colonial Bengal, this book highlights the significant roles--religious, social, and cultural--that a prominent Hindu devotional current played in the lives of wide and diverse sections of colonial Bengali society. Not only does the book thereby enrich our understanding of the history and development of Bengali Vaiṣṇavism, but it also sheds valuable new light on the texture and dynamics of colonial Hinduism beyond the discursive and social-historical parameters of an entrenched Hindu "Renaissance" paradigm. A landmark in the burgeoning field of Bengali Vaiṣṇava studies, this book will be of interest to scholars of modern Hinduism, religion, and colonial South Asian social and intellectual history.

The president and acarya of the Gopinath Gaudiya Math offers his insights into in the teachings of Gaudiya Vaishnavism in this enlightening book. Who am I? Who is God? What is Guru? How do I relate to other gurus and their disciples? What is the dharma that we follow? What are the impediments to service? What is our shelter? What should we meditate on while chanting? These and many other important questions are answered conclusively and authoritatively by Swami B. B. Bodhayan, current acarya of the Gopinath Gaudiya Math. Born into a Vaishnava family, the author served his guru, Srila B. P. Puri Goswami Thakur, with unwavering faith for decades. He studied and realized the essential teachings of Gaudiya Vaishnavism. In Essential Vaishnava Teachings, he shares his illuminating insights on the path of bhakti.