Examining the Shifting Paradigms of Bhakti and Sanskrit Literature through Devotional Poetry of Jayadeva and Dadu

The wave of the Bhakti movement significantly affected India for over a period of twelve centuries. Considering that it left inerasable impressions on the history and culture of the land, this research paper argues that what only imbibed the feeling of pure devotion also became a tool in the hands of those who were desirous of radical religious, political and social changes. To prove this, the paper undertakes the translation of Dadu Dayal’s Sanskrit compositions. Additionally, the paper also questions the very model of Bhaktikal (the Age of Devotional Literature), propagated by the scholars of Hindi Literature, which divides it into two distinct theological categories, Sagun and Nirgun. By examining the devotional poetry of Jayadeva Goswami and Dadu Dayal, and their sectarian positions, it demonstrates that the proponents of the two diametrically opposite schools of Bhakti did not always honour such a distinction for bhakti’s spirit is above such schisms.

DEVOTIONAL DISCOURSE AND FEMALE AUTHORSHIP: FROM THE STEELE CIRCLE TO MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT

The article brings into discussion the case of a few exceptional women who wrote, published, and became popular in the Age of Reason as poets, critics, and activists. They were considered as Nonconformist because they belonged to the Baptist or Unitarian Church and did not follow the mainstream Church of England views. On the other hand, the end of the eighteenth century witnessed the rise of Romantic aesthetics and of a number of nature poets. The questions this article attempts to answer refer both to the influence of the Biblical discourse on a group of women’s literary and non-literary productions and to the way in which the emerging Romantic aesthetics also impacted their work. How did devotional poetry go along Romantic principles and feminist views? Anne Steele’s and Mary Steele’s poetry, Mary Scott’s and Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminist agenda will be highlighted in the analysis.

Of People and Protest: Spiritual Resistance in Newar Hymns

The spiritual and the political at times merge together in the formation of powerful voice of protest in quest of social harmony. This is also seen in Newari cultural landscape. Newari hymns present that the collective imagination poetically transcends beyond the earthly domain of control of authority and social structures, revolting against the prevalent social order. The paper studies two historical Newari hymns “Shitala Maju” and “Bijaya Laxmi” from the perspective of the cultural resistance. When the hymns that are still sung as integral cultural performance in social life of the Newari settlements are analysed to examine the nature of their spiritual quest, the hymns, in the form of devotional poetry, emerge as a sharp critique of the then power structure. This paper argues that the Newari hymns raise the voice of people against the atrocities of both the state and/or the King in the form of spiritual resistance in its inner core though such poems externally display devotion as their primary ethos.

Poets, Patronage, and Print in Sixteenth-Century Portugal

Portugal was not always the best place for poets in the sixteenth century. Against the backdrop of an expanding empire, poets struggled to articulate their worth to rulers and patrons. Many of their works considered what poetry could do and what its value was. The answers that poets like Luís de Camões, Francisco de Sá de Miranda, António Ferreira, and Diogo Bernardes offered to these questions ranged from lofty ideals to more practical concerns of making ends meet. This book articulates a ‘pragmatics of poetry’ that combines literary analysis and book history with methods from sociology to explore how poets thought about themselves and negotiated the value of their verse. Poets compared their work to that of lawyers and doctors and tried to set themselves apart as a special group of professionals. They threatened their patrons as well as flattered them and tried to turn their poetry from a gift into something like a commodity or service that had to be paid for. While poets set out to write in the most ambitious genres, they sometimes refused to spend months composing an epic without the prospect of reward. Their books of verse, when printed, were framed as linguistic propaganda as well as objects of material and aesthetic worth at a time when many said that non-devotional poetry was a sinful waste of time. This is therefore a book about how poets, metaphorically and more literally, tried to turn poetry and the paper it was written on into gold.

Why Print Poetry?

The 1590s saw what has come to be known as the ‘lyric’ poetry of many of the writers in this book printed for the first time. This chapter investigates the rush of activity in Lisbon’s print houses as the century came to a close, focusing especially on why the many individuals involved in the print trade chose to print poems that had been circulating, sometimes widely, in manuscript for quite some time. It sets out a distaste for love poetry that was frequently articulated in Inquisitorial printing licences and in the paratexts to other books printed in the period, before tracing how the terms of approval for non-devotional poetry began to shift towards the end of the sixteenth century. Three principal justifications for printing collections of poetry were presented in the period. The first involved using print to disseminate a vision of the best of the Portuguese language, simultaneously to those outside the nation, who doubt its capacity as a vehicle for ideas, and to native speakers of the language, who might learn from its most able and elegant practitioners, i.e. poets. The second reason relates more closely to the change in medium in question: editors and printers argued that print was a means of tackling the errors introduced by manuscript dissemination. The third and final justification was the desire to make a name for a poet, which ties in closely with the other justifications for print, because establishing an individual’s renown required settling their oeuvre and often involved claiming them as a national icon.

A War to Remember (1)

The Iran–Iraq War ran for eight grueling and bloody years between 1980 and 1988, when the Islamic Republic was still in its infancy, irrevocably changing the official literary discourse of the 1980s. Through a socio-literary analysis, this chapter investigates the way in which the state’s martial campaign was manifested in, and promoted by, the canonized voices of the war, resulting in the launch of a whole new genre of Sacred Defense poetry, and the deployment of a form of mystic militantism, drawing on the lexicon and tropes of the classical Persian mystical and devotional poetry.