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Religious Reading and Everyday Lives in Devotional Hinduism considers religious reading through a study of the Pushtimarg, a Hindu community whose devotional practices and community identity have developed in close relationship to a genre of prose hagiography written during the 17th century. Combining ethnographic fieldwork and close readings of Indian language texts, each chapter of the book showcases various ways in which devotees have performatively read and interpreted these hagiographies in ways that help them navigate between their roles as devotional caretakers of the Hindu deity Krishna and their social and familial obligations in the modern world.
List of contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transliteration and Translation
- Introduction: An Ethnography of Reading
- 1. Dialogical Reading: The Pushtimarg's Performative Canon
- 2. Commentarial Reading: Historicizing Hagiography and Making Modern Readers
- 3. Public Reading: Debating Text, Temple, and Religious Authority
- 4. Community Reading: Learning Affective Piety
- 5. Women's Reading: Navigating Family, Gender, and Devotion
- Conclusion: Religious Reading and Everyday Lives
- Appendix
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Emilia Bachrach is Assistant Professor of Religion and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Oberlin College. Her research focuses on how people's interpretations of religious texts inform and are informed by intimate negotiations of the family and the self, and by changing class, regional, and gender identities in contemporary western India. She also works with oral and written texts in early modern and modern languages, including Braj Bhasha, Gujarati, and Hindi.
Summary
Religious texts are not stable objects, passed down unchanged through generations. The way in which religious communities receive their scriptures changes over time and in different social contexts. This book considers religious reading through a study of the Pushtimarg, a Hindu community whose devotional practices and community identity have developed in close relationship with Vārtā Sāhitya (Chronicle Literature), a genre of Hindi prose hagiography written during the 17th century. Through hagiographies that narrate the relationships between the deity Krishna and the Pushtimarg's early leaders and their disciples, these hagiographies provide community history, theology, vicarious epiphany, and models of devotion. While steeped in the social world of early-modern north India, these texts have continued to be immensely popular among generations of modern devotees, whose techniques of reading and exegesis allow them to maintain the narratives as primary guides for devotional living in Gujarat-the western state of India where the Pushtimarg thrives today.
Combining ethnographic fieldwork with close readings of Hindi and Gujarati texts, the book examines how members of the community engage with the hagiographies through recitation and dialogue in temples and homes, through commentary and translation in print publications and on the Internet, and even through debates in courts of law. The book argues that these acts of "reading" inform and are informed by both intimate negotiations of the family and the self, and also by politically potent disputes over matters such as temple governance. By studying the texts themselves, as well as the social contexts of their reading, Religious Reading and Everyday Lives in Devotional Hinduism provides a distinct example of how changing class, regional, and gender identities continue to shape interpretations of a scriptural canon, and how, in turn, these interpretations influence ongoing projects of self and community fashioning.
Additional text
Religious Reading and Everyday Lives in Devotional Hinduism should find extensive readership among scholars interested in Hindu devotional and narrative literature, the development of modern Hinduism, and practices of religious reading. Bachrach's clear and engaging prose makes the book accessible to both specialists and non-specialists alike, and I look forward to incorporating the book into my own teaching repertoire.
