Preliminary Material /John A. Ramsaran -- Preface /John A. Ramsaran -- Introduction /John A. Ramsaran -- The European Background /John A. Ramsaran -- The Indian Background /John A. Ramsaran -- Religious Practice and Poetic Expression /John A. Ramsaran -- Middle English Lyrics and Saguṇa Bhakti /John A. Ramsaran -- The Baroque in English and Hindi Religious Poetry /John A. Ramsaran -- Divine Infatuation /John A. Ramsaran -- The Metaphysical Vision /John A. Ramsaran -- English Metrical Psalms, Donne's Holy Sonnets and Tulasī Dāsa's Vinaya Patrikā /John A. Ramsaran -- Allegory and the Religious Epic /John A. Ramsaran -- Conclusion /John A. Ramsaran -- Bibliography /John A. Ramsaran -- Index /John A. Ramsaran.

This book offers an interpretive history of bhakti, an influential religious perspective in Hinduism. Prentiss argues that although bhakti is mentioned in every contemporary sourcebook on Indian religions, it still lacks an agreed-upon definition. "Devotion" is found to be the most commonly used synonym. Prentiss seeks a new perspective on this elusive concept. Her analysis of Tamil (south Indian) materials leads her to suggest that bhakti be understood as a doctrine of embodiment. Bhakti, she says, urges people towards active engagement in the worship of God. She proposes that the term "devotion" be replaced by "participation," emphasizing bhakti's call for engagement in worship and the necessity of embodiment to fulfill that obligation.

Combines Western theories of the sublime (from Longinus to Lyotard) with indigenous Indian modes of reading in order to construct a comprehensive theory of both the Indian sublime and Indian devotional verse.

In this interpretive history of bhakti, both chronicle and comparison are used to identify and analyze bhakti as understood by various Tamil Siva-bhakti authors and authorities."--BOOK JACKET.

Kabir was a great iconoclastic-mystic poet of fifteenth-century North India; his poems were composed orally, written down by others in manuscripts and books, and transmitted through song. Scholars and translators usually attend to written collections, but these present only a partial picture of the Kabir who has remained vibrantly alive through the centuries mostly in oral forms. Entering the worlds of singers and listeners in rural Madhya Pradesh, Bodies of Song combines ethnographic and textual study in exploring how oral transmission and performance shape the content and interpretation of vernacular poetry in North India. The book investigates textual scholars' study of oral-performative traditions in a milieu where texts move simultaneously via oral, written, audio/video-recorded, and electronic pathways. As texts and performances are always socially embedded, Linda Hess brings readers into the lives of those who sing, hear, celebrate, revere, and dispute about Kabir. Bodies of Song is rich in stories of individuals and families, villages and towns, religious and secular organizations, castes and communities. Dialogue between religious/spiritual Kabir and social/political Kabir is a continuous theme throughout the book: ambiguously located between Hindu and Muslim cultures, Kabir rejected religious identities, pretentions, and hypocrisies. But even while satirizing the religious, he composed stunning poetry of religious experience and psychological insight. A weaver by trade, Kabir also criticized caste and other inequalities and today serves as an icon for Dalits and all who strive to remove caste prejudice and oppression.