Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India

Description

Early modern India—a period extending from the fifteenth to the late eighteenth century—saw dramatic cultural, religious, and political changes as it went from Sultanate to Mughal to early colonial rule. Witness to the rise of multiple literary and devotional traditions, this period was characterized by immense political energy and cultural vibrancy.
Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India brings together recent scholarship on the languages, literatures, and religious traditions of northern India. It focuses on the rise of vernacular languages as vehicles for literary expression and historical and religious self-assertion, and particularly attends to ways in which these regional spoken languages connect with each other and their cosmopolitan counterparts. Hindu, Muslim, and Jain idioms emerge in new ways, and the effect of the volume as a whole is to show that they belong to a single complex cultural conversation.

About the Editors
Tyler Williams is assistant professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago, USA.
Anshu Malhotra is associate professor in the Department of History, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Delhi, India.
John S. Hawley is Claire Tow Professor of Religion, Barnard College, Columbia University, USA.

Table of contents

List of Tables
Acknowledgements
Note on Transliteration
Introduction
Tyler Williams and Anshu Malhotra

Part One Between Cosmopolitan and Bhāṣā

1. The Emergence of Hindi Literature: From Transregional Maru-Gurjar to Madhyadeśī Narratives Imre Bangha
2. Urdu as Persian: Some Eighteenth-Century Evidence on Vernacular Poetry as Language Planning
Arthur Dudney
3. Muslim Mahākāvyas: Sanskrit and Translation in the Sultanates
Luther Obrock
4. Making Sense of Bhāṣā in Sanskrit: Rādhāmohan Ṭhakkur’s Mahābhāvānusāriṇī-ṭīkā and Literary Culture in Early Eighteenth-Century Bengal
Samuel Wright
5. Commentary as Translation: The Vairāgya Vṛnd of Bhagvandas Niranjani
Tyler Williams

Part Two Poetic Genres and Personalities

6. Poetry in Ragas or Ragas in Poetry? Studies in the Concept of Poetic Communication Raman P. Sinha
7. Searching for the Source or Mapping the Stream? Some Text-Critical Issues in the Study of Medieval Bhakti
Jaroslav Strnad
8. Duality in the Language and Literary Style of Raskhan’s Poetry
Hiroko Nagasaki
9. Religious Syncretism and Literary Innovation: New Perspectives on Bhakti and Rasas in the Vijnānagītā by Keshavdas
Stefania Cavaliere
10. ‘This Is How We Play Holī’: Allegory in North Indian Digambar Jain Holī Songs
John E. Cort
11. Hindi Bārahmāsā Tradition: From Narpati Nālha to Present-Day Folk Songs and Popular Publications
Teiji Sakata

Part Three History in Hindi
12. War and Succession: Padmakar, Man Kavi, and the Gosains in Bundelkhand
William Pinch
13. The Poetics of History in Padmakar’s Himmatbahādurvirudāvalī
Allison Busch
14. Making the War Come Alive: Ḍiṅgal Poetry and Padmakar’s Himmatbahādurvirudāvalī
Dalpat Rajpurohit
15. Alam: A Poet of Many Worlds
Shreekant Kumar Chandan
16. The Pursuit of Pilgrimage, Pleasure, and Military Alliances: Nāgarīdās’s Tīrthānanda
Heidi R. M. Pauwels

Part Four Sampradāy and Beyond
17. Gopal Bhatt: Carrier of Bhakti to the North
Shrivatsa Goswami
18. Gadadhar Bhatt and His Family: Facilitators of the Song of Bhakti in Vrindavan
Swapna Sharma
19. Bhaṭṭs in Braj
John Stratton Hawley
20. ‘Why Do We Still Sift the Husk-Like Upaniṣads?’ Revisiting Vedānta in Early Chaitanya Vaishnava Theology
Rembert Lutjeharms
21. Religious Reading and Everyday Lives
Emilia Bachrach

About the Editors and Contributors
Index