Last November, at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in San Diego, I presented the following paper.  I also presented it on Monday at the South Asia Graduate Student Forum at Columbia University.  The paper is entitled “Garlanding Hinduism: Nābhādās’s Bhaktamāl in the Colonial Context.”  Here’s a description:

The Bhaktamāl played a key role in the emergence of modern Hinduism.  From the time of its composition in the early seventeenth century, Nābhādās’s collection of hagiographies has served as a site for debate and discussion over the boundaries of an inclusive community united through loving devotion.  A key moment in the transmission and reception of this text came during the first decade of the twentieth century when two scholars, Sītārāmśaraṇ Bhagavān Prasād ‘Rūpkalā’ and George Abraham Grierson turned their attention to the Bhaktamāl and composed modern commentaries on it.  This presentation will consider these commentaries and, in so doing, hopefully shed some light on the emergence of a broadly defined Vaishnava and Hindu community

And here’s a PDF of the paper.

I’ve decided to reorganize Bhaktamal.org as a blog. This change should make it easier to keep up with new content and make it easier for me to make casual additions.I expect to write more here once I actually start writing in earnest, probably in the new year.

This is a preprint of an article submitted for consideration to Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory [2007] [copyright Taylor & Francis]; Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory is available online at: http://journalsonline.tandf.co.uk/

Through the Bhaktamāl and its most influential commentary, therefore, we witness a debate over the boundaries of a religious community. In support of their positions, Nābhādās and Priyādās advance different visions of the logic of devotion and its objects and articulate different understandings of the relationship between historical devotees and a past which transcends historical time. The tension I explore in this essay, between Nābhādās and Priyādās can, in hindsight, be viewed as a debate over the boundaries and composition of what would later come to be called Hinduism. In the colonial context of the nineteenth century, this debate would become more prominent and well defined, but many of the ingredients were already present during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In this essay, I do not have space to trace the Bhaktamāl’s long tradition into the nineteenth century, but this brief analysis of the Bhaktamāl and its earliest known commentary may contribute to a better understanding of the religious subjectivities of the traditionalist advocates of modern Hinduism.

Read more (PDF)

Narendra Jhā’s Bhaktamāl: Paṭhānuśīlan evam Vivecan is a thorough account and critical edition of Nābhādās’s Bhaktamāl. Jhā’s detailed study, published in 1978, still provides the best general overview of the Bhaktamāl, engaging closely with the previous literature and carefully weighing the evidence. In addition to treating basic but nonetheless difficult questions of author and date, Jhā positions the Bhaktamāl within Hindi literature and devotional Hinduism. He surveys this text’s extensive commentarial tradition, and he provides a detailed account of Bhaktamāl manuscripts in India. Jhā’s volume culminates in a critical edition of the Nābhādās’s work that attempts to reconstruct the original form of this important but understudied text.

There have not been many book-length studies of the Bhaktamāl, and none of these are in English. Jhā has provided an important service to all subsequent Bhaktamāl scholars by carefully and definitively considering prior debates about the most fundamental elements of the Bhaktamāl and resolving them as far as the evidence allows.

Jhā, Narendra. Bhaktamāl, Pāthānuśīlana evam Vivecan. Patna: Anupam Prakāśan, 1978.

Cross-posted at 113thstreet.net

Yesterday evening the India International Centre hosted a musical performance of Tukaram’s abhangs followed by a screening of Sant Tukaram, a 1936 Marathi film. In 1937, this film became the first Indian film to win an award at the Venice Film Festival. It is a simple yet powerful depiction of the the life of the early seventeenth-century Marathi poet-saint Tukaram.

Dilip Chitre introduced the film by contextualizing it in terms of the social and political situation of 1930s India. This Tukaram is clearly modeled on Mahatma Gandhi. Tukaram has devoted himself to the praise of Pandurang, his chosen deity, even at the expense of his own well-being and the prosperity of his wife and children. Despite, or because of, his piety and simplicity, Tukaram finds himself beset by enemies. A powerful Brahmin in particular persecutes Tukaram and attempts to take credit for his compositions.

Tukaram does not resist persecution. Instead, he submits to the punishments imposed on him by the mighty. The schemes of the persecutors, however, all fail. The mighty, including the great Marathi leader Shivaji, are eventually conquered by Tukaram’s devotion to God, and Pandurang intervenes to protect his followers from harm. As in Gandhian thought, Truth and piety trump worldly power and deceit.

By modeling this Tukaram so clearly on Gandhi, the historical/literary figure of Tukaram comes to be seen as a precedent for Gandhi. Tukaram’s hagiography becomes indistinguishable from Gandhi’s. Hagiographical tropes are notoriously portable. Encounters with the powerful serve to demonstrate the superiority and humility of the saint and to illustrate the contingent nature of political dominance.

In the waning days of the Raj, such a message would have seemed particularly relevant.

Cross posted from 113th Street.

A basic mistake regarding orientalism is the expectation that orientalists will be consistently haughty and disdainful of the ‘Orient’ they describe. The consistency of orientalism lies in its conviction that ‘Orientals’ are better off being ruled by Europeans. Orientalists portray the ‘East’ as static, tyranical, and obscure, but they oftentimes express this discursively established pattern in apparently objective or even sympathetic terms.

There can be no doubt that F.S. Growse’s Mathurá: A District Memoir is a work of orientalist scholarship. Growse was a colonial administrator, and this volume is a work in service of empire. He can be critical of the actual administration of empire, particularly his own transfer out of Mathurá, but he does not seem to doubt in the slightest that Indians are better off under English tutelage.

That said, Growse is not some comic book imperial villain. He shows great curiosity in the culture he finds himself surrounded by and is generally sympathetic in his portrayal of this culture. At times he seems haughty or dismissive, but he usually takes care to note the beauty and truth of particular Hindu doctrines.

Growse is neither ill-informed about nor disdainful of Indian culture, but his sympathy, intelligence, and curiosity do not prevent him from advocating and personally participating in European domination of distant societies.

Cross posted from 113th Street.

Next month, the Indian government will launch the New Linguistic Survey of India, which seeks to update and expand the work directed a century ago by George Abraham Grierson:

What are the objectives of the [New Linguistic Survey of India]? It will primarily profile the Indian linguistic space by describing each language and speech variety, its structure, socio-cultural role and demographics. The survey will make possible a reasonable lexicon and grammatical sketch for each language. It will also record the interactions between various linguistic communities, which involves tracking bilingualism and multilingualism. There will also be a massive audio-visual documentation of speech varieties. Linguistic maps, charts, graphs and atlases of languages will be created. (Outlook)

Cross posted from 113th Street.

Krishna Sharma’s Bhakti and the Bhakti Movement is an extended critique of academic understandings of bhakti. “Bhakti” in Sanskrit and related languages is a general term for loving devotion, but it has also become a technical term for exclusive monotheistic devotion to a personal God to the exclusion of other paths traditionally available to Hindus, particularly jñāna, or experiential knowledge. Sharma forcefully argues that this technical, academic understanding of bhakti is mistaken. The idea that a devotional monotheism spread throughout India, from South to North, during the medieval period (”the Bhakti Movement”) is a product of Western orientalists, who influenced later Indian scholars.

My adviser Jack Hawley, in a lecture at Columbia University, has observed that these nineteenth-century orientalists never used the phrase “Bhakti Movement.” These scholars may have contributed to a misunderstanding of bhakti, as Sharma argues, but they cannot be credited with inventing the notion of a Bhakti Movement. We need to look elsewhere to trace the origins of this concept.

The narrow understanding of bhakti that Sharma derides can be found in one Hindu sect: the Gauḍiya Vaishnavas. These followers of Kṛṣṇa Caitanya advance precisely this notion of Bhakti. H.H. Wilson, in an offhand remark, referred to this form of bhakti as prevalent in Bengal. Wilson’s accurate enough comment got picked up by subsequent orientalists, Western then Indian, who mistakenly applied the part to the whole.

Sharma’s main argument for the inapplicability of this notion of bhakti more generally is the existence of nirguṇa bhakti–devotion to the qualityless absolute. These bhakts deny the existence of a personal God in favor of dedication to a formless and indescribable absolute. If such a position could be described as bhakti then the prevailing academic notion, described above, is untenable.

In a review of this book, David Lorenzen acknowledges Sharma’s important contribution to the academic discussion of bhakti but identifies several major flaws. He asserts that Sharma advances a “devotionally and nationalistically tinged version of Advaita Vedānta associated with such modern intellectuals as Swami Vivekananda and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan.” He argues that Sharma sometimes redefines terms to suit her own purpose, and he observes that Sharma has failed to cite recent scholarship on bhakti that moves “beyond the older bhakti-religion paradigm she justly criticizes.”

Sharma cites the Bhaktamāl of Nābhādās as evidence that at the time of its composition, bhakti was only understood generically. This text, she correctly observes, refers to a number of bhakts who cannot be readily incorporated into the narrow concept of bhakti that she criticizes. Interestingly enough, the major commentary on the Bhaktamāl, the Bhaktirasabodhinī, was composed by Priyādās, a Gauḍiya Vaishnava. In this commentary, we would then expect to find a specifically Caitanyite concept of bhakti, which would put it in opposition to the text being commented upon.

Many discussions of the Bhaktamāl and the Bhaktirasabodhinī do not adequately distinguish between these works. A careful reading of these two texts in their entirety is necessary to determine exactly what concept of bhakti they are advancing. Does Nābhā-jī only refer to bhakti in a generic sense? Does Priyādās use bhakti in a different and more technical manner? If so, why did Priyādās choose to base his work on one that advanced a perspective diametrically opposed to his own view?

Works Cited

Hawley, John Stratton. “The Bhakti Movement: Says Who? Since When?” Lecture. Columbia University. 21 February 2005.

Lorenzen, David N. Untitled. The Journal of Asian Studies 48:3 (August 1989). 665-6.

Sharma, Krishna. Bhakti and the Bhakti Movement: A New Perspective. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1987.

Cross posted from 113th Street.

The following prospectus was accurate as of August 2006.

Introduction

The Bhaktamāl, Nābhādās’s late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century “garland of devotees,” occupies a central position in the consolidation of modern Hinduism. Nābhādās’s text is one of the first and most influential examples of the bhaktamāl genre, collections of poems that recall and praise great devotees. By praising the qualities of over 900 bhakts, this early modern text sets the boundaries of a devotional community that far exceeds the sectarian context in which Nābhādās wrote. In so doing, it also helps to shape the intertwined trajectories of linguistic and national consolidation. These trajectories became realized in the nineteenth century as modern Hinduism, the Hindi language, and the nationalist movement. An unequal negotiation between British imperialists and their elite colonial subjects certainly helped to solidify these categories, but these streams all flow from the centuries preceding colonial rule. The Bhaktamāl is not a text which remains fixed in time; rather, it exists in a variety of performative contexts from the time of its original composition until the present. The Bhaktamāl constitutes a major, if largely unacknowledged, element in constructions of Hinduism. This project will closely consider the Bhaktamāl and its subsequent iterations and uses in a variety of contexts. In so doing, it will trace the closely related strands of religious, linguistic, and political consolidation from the early seventeenth century until the beginning of the twentieth century.

Literature Review

The Bhaktamāl has not had the scholarly attention due to a work of its significance. The widely acknowledged difficulty of this text may be partially to blame for this state of affairs. The Bhaktamāl was never meant to be read on its own; rather, it should be performed by a trained kathāvācak, a reciter and exegete. Priyādās, the Bhaktamāl’s first commentator, may have been such a reciter. Nābhādās’s text is nearly telegraphic in its brevity. It requires elucidation in order to be properly understood. This brevity provoked H.H. Wilson to dismiss the Bhaktamāl as “little more than a catalogue,” and he used it in exactly this manner. Without necessarily accepting Wilson’s analysis, many references to the Bhaktamāl do treat the text in this manner and mine it for information about particular devotees without pausing to consider the Bhaktamāl’s logic.

Recent scholarship has begun to remedy this situation. In a 1999 article “History, Devotion and the Search for Nābhādās of Galta,” Vijay Pinch focuses on the figure of Nābhādās and highlights the potential benefits of an in-depth study of the Bhaktamāl. In contrast to most previous studies, Pinch looks at the logic of the text as a whole, which assembles “a literary corpus (māla or garland) for the benefit of future generations” (368). Pinch argues that this text asserts the importance of bhakts and sants, as opposed to sadhus, and defines the sampradāy very widely, including women as well as men and members of dominant as well as subordinate castes. In so doing, Pinch argues, Nābhādās

crafted a language of and conceptual frame for supra-sectarian religious organisation that could accommodate both monastic and lay populations. In short, Nabhadas articulated a broadly conceived Vaiṣṇava catholicism that extended beyond the confines of the monastic sanctuary without undermining the importance of and need for that sanctuary. (369)

Through this study of the Bhaktamāl, Pinch looks at the mechanics of how a broad shift toward bhakti religiosity affected the organization of a monastic community (370). Pinch notes the “epistemological frame” Nābhādās employs to divide bhakts into “figures from the idealised bygone ages” and those “in the less-than-perfect recent past and near present” (375). With bhakti, characterized by complete surrender to one’s guru, the Bhaktamāl offers the individual transcendence of his or her age through “direct and immediate access to God” (376).

For Pinch, the verses of the Bhaktamāl themselves demonstrate Nābhādās’s Vaishnava catholicity. Not only does he include “untouchable, shudra, and female bhaktas as part of the inner circle of twelve disciples of Ramanand,” he outlines a lineage of “Vaiṣṇava-dharma in the kaliyuga” that establishes Rāmānuja as “first among equals” rather than propounding an exclusive path to God (395). Even more significantly, Pinch interprets Nābhādās’s biography of Rāghavānand, Rāmānand’s purported guru, as marking a transformation “of Vaiṣṇavism from an exclusivist monastic order to a bhakti approach to broad (one might even describe it as ‘mass’) religious transformation” (397). Obedience to the guru and loyalty to the sampradāy may remain indispensable, “but constituting the sampraday and interpreting the guru’s message is the business of the devotee” (397).

Pinch may be unique in his consideration of the overarching logic of the Bhaktamāl, but other scholars have also explored more specific aspects of the this text’s outlook. Gilbert Pollet, in his “The Mediaeval Vaiṣṇava Miracles As Recorded in the Hindi ‘Bhakta Māla,’” considers the role of miracles (acaraja) in this work (475). Through careful attention to the incidents so labelled, Pollet elucidates the aspects of such events. These miracles usually concern Vishnu or one of his avatars (476). Human beings, however, occasionally effect miracles without apparent divine intervention. An invocation or confident utterance by the devotee often precedes the performance of a miracle, particularly in moments of distress, but miracles also demonstrate unrequested divine benevolence without immediate need (478-80). Miracles may demonstrate the intent of protecting a bhakt (481), spreading bhakti (482), or rewarding devotees for their virtues (483), especially arcā, “worship of divine images,” and sādhusevā, “attendance on the saints” (484). Some miracles do not interfere with the laws of nature, but others may “constitute an exception to the natural order of things” (486). Pollet notes that miracles seem “to be but casually mentioned” in the Bhaktamāl, but concludes by stating that they offer “eloquent proof (‘paraco‘) that devotion (‘bhakti‘) is regarded by Viṣṇu as the highest religion (‘parama dharma’)” (487).

While Pollet elucidates the role of miracles in the Bhaktamāl, John Stratton Hawley’s “Morality beyond Morality” turns to the Bhaktamāl’s treatment of dharma. Hawley considers the Bhaktamāl alongside its best known commentary, Priyādās’s Bhaktirasabodhinī. His treatment of these two texts does not distinguish between them. These accounts of bhakts‘ lives seem to reject the prescriptive morality of dharma, and indeed they do oftentimes explicitly dismiss the propositions of varṇāśrama dharma; however, texts such as the Bhaktamāl encode “a more fundamental morality, which, if manifested with the naturalness that these saints evince, would lead to right living in the absence of all code and precept” (48-50). Hawley considers Nābhādās and Priyādās’s portraits of three bhakts, Mīrābāī, Narasī Mehtā, and Pīpādās, and argues that they each embody a particular saintly virtue. Mīrā defies the bounds of conventional modesty but exhibits a fearlessness in her devotion to Krishna that is well-suited to her Rajput background (51-5). Narasī shows extraordinary generosity even as he himself faces complete privation. In contrast to the ordinary economy of scarcity, Narasī exists in an economy of unending abundance and divine fellowship (55-60). Pīpā and his wife Sītā live in a marriage that defies the standards of traditional dharma but demonstrates an ideal of service to the satsang, “God’s society”(60-2). Bhakti is not amoral; rather, it sits on a higher ethical plane. Hawley explains,

Whereas worldly dharma establishes its ethical community by means of social differentiation and complementary function, bhakti does so by reuniting socially disparate elements in a common cause: the praise of God. This seemingly external referent does not so much cancel recognizably dharmic virtues, as it liberates them from the social codes and contexts to which they are usually subordinated. (63)

In the Bhaktamāl, dharma is generally subordinated to bhakti; however, Vaishnava bhakti’s vision of God as removing fear, being infinitely generous, and acting devotedly in the service of his devotees unsurprisingly leads to the adoption of these values by the community of worship (69).

Other scholars have explored the Bhaktamāl and its commentaries within their various sectarian contexts. Phillip Lutgendorf’s unpublished MA thesis positions the Bhaktamāl and the Bhaktirasabodhinī within a Gauḍīya Vaishnava context. He provides translations of the forty-four stanzas of the Bhaktamāl and its major commentary that describe Kṛṣṇa Caitanya and his immediate followers. Lutgendorf raises the issue of Caitanya’s influence on bhakti among Hindi speakers as well as on the history of Hindi literature. This thesis highlights the tension between specific regional movements and broader trans-regional ones. Lutgendorf presents Priyādās as a Hindi-speaking Gauḍīya Vaishnava who, despite his sectarian affiliation, shared in the eclectic spirit of Nābhādās’s text. Lutgendorf argues that Priyādās was the product of a multi-ethnic and multilingual community centered in Vrindaban.

The Bhaktamāl has received more scholarly attention in Hindi than in European languages. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Sitārām Śaraṇ Bhagvān Prasād ‘Rūpkalā’ produced an erudite and devotional edition of the text accompanied by his own exegesis, to which I return below. More recently, Narendra Jhā’s Bhaktamāl: Pāṭhānuśīlan evam Vivecan approaches Nābhādās’ text from a more academic perspective. Jhā positions the Bhaktamāl within its religious and literary contexts. He provides an account of the Bhaktamāl’s subject matter and discusses the commentarial traditions stemming from this text. He situates Nābhādās’s work within biography as a literary genre and in relation to bhakti. Jhā considers the formal aspects of Nābhādās’s poetry and provides an account of manuscripts and previous print editions of the Bhaktamāl. Finally, Jhā has compiled a scholarly edition of Nābhādās’s mūl text; however, this edition is not accompanied by an adequate critical apparatus.

The Bhaktamāl’s life since the time of its composition has been given even less attention than the text itself. In “Bhakti and the British Empire” Pinch adds to our understanding of the Bhaktamāl by exploring the lives of two key figures in its subsequent history, Bhagvān Prasād ‘Rūpkalā’ (1840-1932) and George Abraham Grierson (1851-1941). Pinch argues that a closer look at the religious worlds of these figures calls into question the presentation of “British India as a site of unidirectional mental colonization inflicted by a rationalizing, scientific Europe on a pliable, pre-modern Orient” (160). Pinch situates both Bhagvān Prasād and Grierson as members of aestheticized devotional movements, Rasik and Anglo-Catholic respectively. These men were both closely associated with the Bhaktamāl at the turn of the twentieth century. Bhagvān Prasād composed the major modern commentary on the work of Nābhādās and Priyādās, while Grierson began what could be called an English-language commentary on this text in his “Gleanings from the Bhakta-Mala.” Pinch suggests that Bhagvān Prasād’s and Grierson’s bhakti orientations can help us to understand their expressions of loving sentiment across the racial and national boundaries of the British Empire. For Pinch, bhakti as expressed in the Bhaktamāl was itself a force that shaped the experience of the British Empire for those who lived within it, and he faults those historians who ignore such factors. The evidence presented in “Bhakti and the British Empire” suggests that the role of devotional religiosity is far more important to the history of British rule than has been previously acknowledged. Unfortunately, Pinch does not clearly demonstrate how this religiosity served to shape the experience of empire and diverges from this important argument in order to level a critique against certain vaguely specified currents in South Asian historiography.

Norvin Hein’s The Miracle Plays of Mathura demonstrates the persistence of the Bhaktamāl as an influential text well into the twentieth century. Hein describes a troupe of actors who, during the mid-twentieth century, performed dramatic adaptations of the lives of devotees. This troupe, the Bhaktamāl Nāṭak Maṇḍalī, based its dramas on Nābhādās’s text; although, Hein does not explore the nature or extent of this influence. Their performances were in Khaṛī Bolī Hindi and were thus easily and widely understood. Based in Aligarh, they performed across North India, traveling as far west as Jaipur and as far east as Gaya. Hein acknowledges the deep impact of such performances on their audiences but refuses to speculate on the extent of their reception or their history. Hein provides evidence that as recently as several decades ago, the Bhaktamāl continued to be a living and influential text, but this influence remains largely unexplored and unacknowledged in scholarly literature.

The consolidation of Hinduism has received more attention than the Bhaktamāl, and an adequate review of this literature exceeds the scope of this prospectus. The work that has had the most influence on the thesis presented here, however, is Vasudha Dalmia’s The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions. This book provides a detailed treatment of the intertwined strands of religious, linguistic, and political consolidation that I hope to explore through this treatment of the Bhaktamāl and its successors. Dalmia explores each of these strands through a focus on the figure of Bhāratendu Hariśchandra (1850-1885), the Benarsi writer, intellectual, journalist, and publisher. These religious, linguistic, and political consolidations are nearly inseparable. British administrative policies, particularly at the College of Fort William, and missionary efforts helped to initiate the division of Hindi and Urdu into separate languages. The establishment of Avadhī and Brajbhāṣā as Hindi’s literary predecessors, however, provided an historicized Hindu lineage for the modern language and obscured the British role in its creation. The double meaning of Hindu–religious and geographic–blurred the boundary between religious community and nation. The devotional content of much Avadhī and Brajbhāṣā literature provided the ancient core of modern Hinduism. Hariśchandra identified bhakti as “a devotional form common to all true Indian religiosity,” enabling Hinduism to claim an equivalence with Christianity and Islam. While Dalmia provides a detailed account of a particular moment of consolidation and asserts the importance of direct access to pre-colonial tradition, she does not consider the content of this tradition. With this project, I hope to begin the process of filling this lacuna. Nābhādās’s Bhaktamāl is a major part of this pre-colonial tradition to which Hariśchandra and his contemporaries had access. Through close attention to this particular text, I hope to enrich our understanding of the origins of modern Hinduism.

My dissertation will explore the Bhaktamāl within its commentarial and performative traditions. The works discussed above tend to focus closely on the text of the Bhaktamāl or to position the text in a particular context. I will consider the Bhaktamāl within a wider variety of contexts and across a longer timespan than have previous scholars. Such an approach will have the advantage of illuminating, for instance, the transition from precolonial traditions toward a colonial context. This dissertation is a history of Nābhādās’s Bhaktamāl and its reception. The Bhaktamāl’s history includes expansive, inclusive moments as well as attempts to narrow or systematize this inclusiveness. Chapters of my dissertation, outlined below, will consider both the expansive and the constrictive trends that have shaped the reception of the Bhaktamāl over time. The trajectory I intend to trace is intimately connected to the emergence of Hinduism, Hindi, and Indian nationalism. The clear consolidation of these categories during the nineteenth century had its roots in early modern institutions and ideas. The Bhaktamāl and its most important commentary are the products of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century monastic settings, respectively. Sampradāyik and courtly settings provided the means by which these texts reached a variety of audiences across North India. During the nineteenth century, imperial administration and nascent print capitalism provided the means for greater propagation of these texts, even as they effected a transformation of the texts themselves.

Chapter Outline

The first chapter of my dissertation will consider the mūl text. Nābhādās composed his Bhaktamāl during the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century in the Galta monastery near present-day Jaipur, where he held a subordinate position that was characterized by service to the monastery’s sadhus. Despite or because of this position, Nābhādās took on the task of writing the Bhaktamāl, which describes or references hundreds of human and divine devotees. In this chapter, I will, as far as possible, consider the Bhaktamāl without the lenses of the commentarial literature. Priyādās’s commentary in particular has had a powerful impact on subsequent readings. Though he lived and worked in a Ramanandi context, Nābhādās provides a supra-sectarian framework, discussed above. In the Bhaktamāl, the boundaries of devotion extend far beyond the monastery or sampradāy. Nābhādās insists on the saving power of devotion and praises the bhakts who undermine categories of caste, religion, and family.

The second chapter will consider the first moment of contraction. The first major commentary on the Bhaktamāl interprets the text from a more clearly defined sectarian perspective. This commentary, Priyādās’s Bhaktirasabodhinī, offers a more narrow conception of the relevant religious community. Priyādās lived in Vrindaban and was affiliated with the Caitanya sampradāy. He completed his commentary in 1712, approximately a century after Nābhādās composed his garland. His conception of the Vaishnava community differs sharply from Nābhādās’s outlook. This commentary blunts the Bhaktamāl’s critiques of caste, shifts the focus from individual devotees to Krishna, and insists on a more narrowly sectarian community. Nābhādās’s chappaya form limits him to at most six lines with which to describe each devotee. Priyādās’s use of the kavitta meter and a variable number of stanzas gives him much greater flexibility, which he uses to provide narrative embellishments. Priyādās grants an important role to spiritual aspects of caste. He privileges the sampradāy as the site of religiosity, and he advocates a decidedly Krishnaite Vaishnavism. Priyādās accepts the value of claiming the figures described by Nābhādās but seeks to incorporate these devotees into a more narrowly defined community.

In the third chapter, I will consider the distribution of manuscripts of the Bhaktamāl and the Bhaktirasabodhinī. Ram Das Gupta and Gilbert Pollet (“Eight Manuscripts”) have traced the manuscripts of Priyādās’s text in England, and Narendra Jhā lists numerous manuscripts of the Bhaktamāl both with and without commentary. Jhā notes that this was an extremely popular text, and a cursory examination of manuscript catalogs confirms this observation. Where and in what contexts did the Bhaktamāl spread? What significant variants of the text emerged during this propagation? Did the Bhaktamāl spread in courtly contexts, or did it remain within sampradāyik settings? What can be determined about the Bhaktamāl’s performance and reception in these settings? How is the Bhaktamāl related to Vaishnava competition for patronage? Due to the popularity of the Bhaktamāl, it would be very difficult to give adequate attention to the numerous contexts in which its manuscripts were copied or collected. I therefore plan to limit my consideration to several of the key sites of the Bhaktamāl’s history and reception: the Jaipur region, Braj, Kolkata, and Avadh. Nābhādās; Priyādās; William Price, whom I introduce below; and Rūpkalā composed their texts in these four regions respectively. This chapter will provide a background for examining the numerous print editions of the Bhaktamāl published during the nineteenth century.

This nineteenth-century proliferation of print editions will be the topic of my fourth chapter. The Bhaktamāl became one of the first printed texts in Hindi when British administrators at the College of Fort William published it as an exemplary Brajbhāṣā work. William Price included nineteen selections from Nābhādās’s mūl text along with a Brajbhāṣā prose ṭīkā or gloss. Publishers soon issued editions of the Bhaktamāl in a variety of languages, including Hindi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Tamil, Bengali, and Urdu. The Urdu translation of the text was even translated back into Brajbhāṣā. I plan to consider Hindi and Urdu editions of the Bhaktamāl. Did print accelerate the trans-regional proliferation of the Bhaktamāl in a variety of languages, or did this variety already exist in manuscripts? Edward C. Dimock, Jr. and Tony K. Stewart describe manuscripts of Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja’s Caitanya Caritāmṛta as spreading across a wide geographic area with remarkable consistency. The holiness of the text for Gauḍiya Vaishnavas as well as the structure of the text itself made such consistency possible. Dimock and Stewart characterize the early scribal copies of the text as mass-produced and compare its power to unite a diverse community to the role attributed to the press by Benedict Anderson in defining the imagined community of the nation (53). In the case of such a text, it is unsurprising that the consistency of print editions would largely continue to be maintained by a vigilant community (57). The geographic and linguistic spread of the Bhaktamāl in the nineteenth century seems to suggest that the Bhaktamāl was not constrained in the same manner as the Caitanya Caritāmṛta. Nābhādās’s text does not provide the checks against interpolation that Kṛṣṇadāsa’s does, and the Bhaktamāl is not central to a single sampradāy, as is the Caitanya Caritāmṛta.

Chapter five focuses on two major figures in the standardization of the Bhaktamāl: Rūpkalā and Grierson, both of whom are introduced above. These two colonial civil servants and scholars both worked for a time in Bihar’s educational administration and probably knew each other. Rūpkalā issued what was to become the standard print edition of the Bhaktamāl and Priyādās’s commentary, while providing an exegesis that partially supplanted the role of the specially trained reciter. Grierson’s work complemented this standardization by bringing the text into the ambit of Western knowledge production. These commentarial works, particularly Rūpkalā’s, allowed readers to encounter the Bhaktamāl outside of its traditional context. Rūpkalā enabled readers of modern standard Hindi to access this text without the aid of a kathāvācak while Grierson brought selections from the text to the attention of European-language scholarship. Pinch’s treatment of the lives of these two men argues that bhakti and the Bhaktamāl contributed to shaping the experience of empire for those who lived in it, but he does not present enough evidence in support of this argument. In what ways did Grierson’s and Rūpkalā’s engagement with the Bhaktamāl affect their experience of empire? How did Grierson’s and Rūpkalā’s experience as colonial administrators shape the form that their commentaries ultimately took? Pinch’s article suggests the importance of such questions but does not answer them with enough depth. More significantly for this project, he focuses on the lives of these two men rather than their work on the Bhaktamāl per se. The work of Rūpkalā and Grierson, which is intertwined in as yet unexplored ways, resulted in what was to become the standard edition of the Bhaktamāl, which includes Nābhādās’s mūl text, Priyādās’s ṭīkā, and Rūpkalā’s exegesis. Pinch asserts that a personal commitment to bhakti transformed the experience of empire. How did these two individuals, both engaged in the imperial project, transform the Bhaktamāl?

My thesis will conclude with a consideration of my research’s implication for the study of Religion and of South Asia more generally. Understanding the Bhaktamāl’s contribution to the boundaries of modern Hinduism will help us to better understand processes of canonization. Consideration of the transformations brought about by the arrival of print will contribute to our knowledge of the role new technologies play in defining communities. By following a single literary and religious thread across the divide separating precolonial tradition from colonial modernity, my dissertation will help to elucidate the continuities and disruptions that mark this transition. By increasing understanding of how one of modern Hindi’s claimed antecedents, Brajbhāṣā, came to hold this position, this dissertation may add to our understanding of the entangled histories of Hindi and Urdu literature. By taking a long view at one aspect of the emergence of religious identities, we may be able to better understand the emergence of sharply defined–and too often opposed–Hindu and Muslim communities in South Asia.

Research Plan

July-September 2006: The first stage of my research will take place in London, UK, where I will examine early print editions of the Bhaktamāl and other relevant materials housed in the British Library’s Oriental and India Office Collection (OIOC). I have received funding from Columbia University’s Religion Department for this portion of my research. The OIOC contains at least thirty-three individual bhaktamāls, including Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Tamil, Bengali, and Urdu translations. I plan to consider the modern Hindi, Brajbhāṣā, and Urdu texts.

September 2006-December 2007: During this period, I will be based in Delhi with the support of a dissertation research fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies. This stage will consist of three main components: reading the Bhaktamāl, archival research, and library research.

September-October 2006: Upon arriving in Delhi, I will first undertake a survey of the resources available in India. I will establish contact with faculty and postgraduate students in Delhi. I will visit the archives at which I plan to research, and I will introduce myself to the archivists and librarians in charge of the collections that I wish to consult.

October 2006-December 2007: Gaining a closer understanding of the Bhaktamāl requires reading it alongside someone with deep knowledge of its traditional context. I plan to conduct such a reading at Jawaharlal Nehru University under the direction of Professor Purushottam Agrawal. Other faculty based in Delhi, including Shahid Amin and B.D. Chattopadhyay, may also provide important guidance.

January-April 2007: During this period I will conduct the archival portion of my research. I plan to visit Jaipur, Vrindaban, Mathura, Kolkata, Lucknow, and Ayodhya. Each of these site contains resources that will contribute to an understanding of different stages of the history of the Bhaktamāl and its reception. The Jaipur area, the location of the Bhaktamāl’s composition, houses the City Palace Museum as well as Nābhādās’s own monastery at Galta. Braj, where Priyādās lived and worked, contains the Vrindaban Research Institute, with whom I will be formally affiliated, and other important collections. Kolkata is the location where the Bhaktamāl was first printed. The National Library there hosts the archives of the College of Fort William. Rūpkalā composed his edition of and commentary on the Bhaktamāl in Ayodhya and found a publisher in Lucknow. In these two Avadhī cities, I hope to find records relating to the composition and publication of this important text.

May-September 2007 will be set aside to visit research sites that I had not anticipated, to revisit sites that require further consideration, and to read more carefully the materials collected in the archives.

October-December 2007 will be devoted to reconsidering the research conducted during the previous seventeen months and completing any outstanding tasks in India.

January 2008-May 2009: I plan to return to Columbia University in January 2008 and to spend the following year and a half completing the dissertation.

Selected Bibliography

Burghart, Richard. “The Founding of the Ramanandi Sect.” Ethnohistory 25.2 (Spring 1978): 121-139.

Callewaert, Winand M. and Rupert Snell, eds. According to Tradition: Hagiographical Writing in India. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1994.

Callewaert, Winand M. The Hagiographies of Anantdās: The Bhakti Poets of North India. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2000.

Dalmia, Vasudha. The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bhartendu Harischandra and Nineteenth-century Banaras. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1997.

Digby, Simon. “To Ride a Tiger or a Wall? Strategies of Prestige in Indian Sufi Legend.” According to Tradition: 99-130. 1994.

Dikṣit, Prakāśanārāyaṇ. Nābhādās Kṛt Bhaktamāl: Ek Adhyayan. Ilahabad: Sāhitya Bhavan, 1961.

Dimock, Edward C., Jr. Caitanya Caritāmṛta of Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja: A Translation and Commentary. Ed. Tony K. Stewart. Cambridge: Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University, 1999.

Grierson, George A. “Gleanings from the Bhakta-Mala.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1909): 607-644. (1910): 87-109, 269-306.

Gupta, R.D. “Priyā Dās, Author of the Bhaktirasabodhinī.” BSOAS 32:1 (1969): 57-70.

—. “Studies in the Bhaktirasa-bodhini of Priya Dasa.” Unpublished PhD Dissertation. University of London, 1967.

Hawley, John Stratton. Three Bhakti Voices. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 2005.

Hein, Norvin. The Miracle Plays of Mathurā. New Haven: Yale UP, 1972.

Jhā, Narendra. Bhaktamāl, Pāthānuśīlana evam Vivecan. Patna: Anupam Prakāśan, 1978.

King, Christopher. One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Lutgendorf, Philip. “Kṛṣṇa Caitanya and His Companions as Presented in the Bhaktamāla of Nābhā Jī and the Bhaktirasabodhinī of Priyā Dāsa.” Unpublished MA paper. University of Chicago, 1981.

—. The Life of a Text: Performing the Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas. Berkeley: U of Cal. P, 1991.

McLeod, W.H. Early Sikh Tradition: A Study of the Janam Sākhīs. New York: Oxford UP, 1980.

Monius, Anne. Imagining a Place for Buddhism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001.

Novetzke, Christian Lee. “Divining an Author: The Idea of Authorship in an Indian Religious Tradition.” History of Religions 42.3 (February 2003):213-242.

Pinch, Vijay. “Bhakti and the British Empire.” Past and Present 179 (2003): 159-196.

—. “History, Devotion and the Search for Nabhadas of Galta.” Invoking the Past: The Uses of History in South Asia. Ed. Daud Ali. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.

Pollet, G. “Eight Manuscripts of the Hindī Bhaktamāla in England.” Orientalia Lovaniensia Periodica 1 (1970):203-222.

—. “Studies in the Bhakta Mâla of Nâbhâ Dâsa.” Unpublished PhD dissertation. University of London, 1963.

—. “The Mediaevel Vaiṣṇava Miracles As Recorded in the Hindi ‘Bhakta Māla’” Le Muséon: Revue d’Études Orientales LXXX: 475-487.

Pollock, Sheldon, ed. Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003.

Price, William. Hindee and Hindoostanee Selections: To Which Are Prefixed the Rudiments of Hindoostanee and Bruj Bhakha Grammar. Calcutta: Hindoostanee Press, 1827.

‘Rūpkalā,’ Sitārām Śaraṇ Bhagavān Prasād. Śrī Bhaktamāl. Lucknow: Naval Kishor Book Depot, 2001.

Śarmā, Kailāścandra. Bhaktamāl aur Hindī Kāvya meṅ Usakī Paramparā. Delhi: Manthan, 1983.

Siṁha, Bhagavatī Prasād. Rām-Bhakti meṅ Rasik Sampradāya. Balarāmpur: Avadh Sāhitya Mandir, 1957.

Smith, W.L. Patterns in Indian Hagiography. Guwahati: Srikrishna Prakashan, 2003.

Stark, Ulrike. “Hindi Publishing in the Heart of an Indo-Persian Cultural Metropolis: Lucknow’s Newal Kishore Press (1858-1895).” India’s Literary History: Essays on the Nineteenth Century. Eds. Stuart Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004.

Wilson, H.H. Religious Sects of the Hindus. London: The Christian Lit. Soc. for India, 1904.