A01=Varuni Bhatia
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Varuni Bhatia
automatic-update
bengali vaishnavism religion
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HBJF
Category=HBTQ
Category=HRAX
Category=HRG
Category=NHF
Category=NHTQ
Category=QRAX
Category=QRD
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Language_English
PA=Available
Price_€100 and above
PS=Active
softlaunch
Product details
- ISBN 9780190686246
- Weight: 542g
- Dimensions: 241 x 165mm
- Publication Date: 21 Sep 2017
- Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
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 Vaishnavism--a vibrant and multifaceted religious tradition emanating from the Krishna devotee Chaitnaya (1486-1533)--in Bengal. Drawing on an extensive body of hitherto unexamined archival material, Bhatia finds that both Vaishnava modernizers and secular voices among the educated 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 efforts to recover a "pure" Bengali culture and history at a time of rising anti-colonial sentiment.
In the late nineteenth century, 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 them was the question of "true" Bengali Vaishnavism and its role in the long-term constitution of Bengali culture and society. Who was an authentic Vaishnava? Many authors excluded those groups and communities whose practices they found unacceptable according to their definition of Vaishnava authenticity. At stake in these discourses, argues Bhatia, was the nature and composition of an indigenously-derived modernity inscribed through what she calls the politics of authenticity. It allowed an influential section of Hindu Bengalis to excavate their own explicitly Hindu past 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.
Varuni Bhatia is Assistant Professor of Hindu and South Asian Studies at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
