Unforgetting Chaitanya

Vaishnavism and Cultures of Devotion in Colonial Bengal

Bibliographic Data

ID20005599
AuthorsVaruni Bhatia (0009-0001-9021-1906, corresponding author)
Year2017
Pages312
Publication date2017-09-21
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueUnforgetting Chaitanya (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/oso/9780190686246.001.0001
OpenAlexW4232719361
Open LibraryOL28636002M
ISBN9780190686246
LanguageEN
Citations received14

What role do premodern religious traditions play in the formation of modern secular identities? What relationship exists between regional devotional cultures, key bhakti figures, and anticolonial nationalism in South Asia? What are some of the multiple sites of forgetting and unforgetting that determine how we receive iconic historical figures in the present? Unforgetting Chaitanya addresses these questions by examining late nineteenth-century transformations of Vaishnavism in Bengal—a religious tradition emanating from the figure of Krishna Chaitanya (1486–1533), and articulated in this region through various bodily and artistic practices. Building upon the concept of viraha as longing for the absent one within the Vaishnava worldview, this book argues that educated and middle-class Hindu Bengalis, the bhadralok, (re)turned to Chaitanyite Vaishnavism as a unique expression of excavating their authentic selves. It argues that by searching for literary and historical pasts, discovering long lost sacred spaces, recovering manuscripts, and disciplining Vaishnava practices across sects and castes, the Bengali Hindu middle-class successfully forged a respectable, bhadralok Vaishnavism. The book engages with questions around memory and history, poetics and praxis, and sacred space and print culture in the making of modern Vaishnavism as a devotional and cultural complex, simultaneously. Thus, Unforgetting Chaitanya argues for the methodological relevance of relocating the study of Bengali or Gaudiya Vaishnavism within the historical, intellectual, and cultural context of colonial Bengal, where it assumed its modern form. In doing so, this interdisciplinary book contributes to the fields of both Religion and History of South Asia

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · BENGAL · Bengali · Colonialism · Context (archaeology) · Epistemology · Forgetting · Hinduism · Literature · Middle class · Poetics · Poetry · Political science · Praxis · Sociology · South asia · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Chinese history and philosophy · Gender Studies · History · Indian and Buddhist Studies · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · India · Religion · Vaishnavism

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