Bhakti Beyond the Forest: Current Research on Early Modern Literatures in North India, 2003-2009.

The volume comprises eighteen papers by scholars from North America, Western Europe, India, Japan and East Central Europe presented at the Tenth International Bhakti Conference: Early Modern Literatures in North India at Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, in Miercurea Ciuc, Romania. Organised in four sections focusing on community formation, social embeddedness, ideology and forms of expression, the volume investigates from a diversity of perspectives how religion in general contributed to the formation of early modern literary culture in north India. The papers present current research on Hindu, Jain and syncretistic Hindu-Muslim devotional traditions and concepts from between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries, often tracing the antecedents of a certain phenomenon to earlier developments or examining their afterlives. They engage with Hindi, Sanskrit, Marathi or Gujarati texts and study their material in the light of a variety of disciplines including theology, linguistics, social history and musicology.