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This chapter surveys some of the major religious and intellectual developments during the centuries in which Islamic rulers governed northern India. The devotional work of Shri Chaitanya is highlighted along with the songs of Kabir, Ravidas, the new Ramayana of Tulsidas, and others. The synthesis of Islam and Hinduism produced a rich tapestry of ideas, which translated a profound re‐examination of social reality and significant scientific developments.

This chapter explores Prabhupada's mahāvākya, which is mainly concerned with Krishna. It compares the ways Prabhupada and his predecessors used the Sanskritic equivalents of the mahāvākya, and then studies Prabhupada's main ontological assumption that Krishna is the Supreme Personality of Godhead. Finally, this chapter also considers several transformative practices of Prabhupada's living theology and even compares the audiences of Prabhupada from Chaitanya. The concepts of theological fidelity and Sambandha are also discussed.

This chapter examines the concept of bhakti, which is based on the definition “devotion to a personal deity.” It tries to locate Prabhupada's expression of Chaitanyaite bhakti, and studies some of the issues relevant to scholars of the bhakti's pan-Indic influence. It also studies Chaitanya Vaishnavism, the idea of devotional service, and Prabhupada's own conception of bhakti. This chapter also introduces Rūpa Gosvāmin, his conception of bhakti, and his five principal practices of bhakti.

This chapter serves as a conclusion to Goswami's thesis, which he failed to finish before he died. The discussion immediately starts with the nature of prema, or Love, and shows how the concepts of bhakti and bhakta are related to the factors and events that surrounded Goswami's death. Next, it reviews Goswami's conception of the word theology and tries to determine if there is a present “theology” of the Chaitanya School. It also examines the three manifestations of the loving divinity and the three foundational sacred texts and the ultimate theological focal point of ISKCON. The living theology of the Krishna movement and the concepts of Gita and Krishna are also examined.

This is a highly critical chapter that joins the twin issues of how Chaitanya was perceived in his own life time and thereafter. Of particular interest here is how Chaitanya was invoked in post-Chaitanya Bengal for a wide variety of reasons and purposes. Dissenting and non-conformist religious cults in post-Chaitanya Bengal cited his life and work to register their protest against Brahmanical and upper-caste excesses; the educated and upper-caste followers, on the other hand, converted him into a symbol of political resistance in a manner that strengthened their own political ambitions under a colonial regime. This chapter brings back the issue of just how the lay reader and the scholar alike need to be clearer about the use of nomenclatures such as ‘Bengal Vaishnavism’ or Gaudiya Vaishnavism. The author argues how in modern Bengal, there were major cultural figures who were Vaishnava by persuasion and yet not affiliated to the Chaitanya camp. This chapter also includes interesting and original studies of Chaitanya’s religion, his approach to the question of women and sexuality, and also how Chaitanya was perceived by the most prominent religious groups in colonial Bengal such as the Brahmos.

This book explores the life and work of Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī (1874–1937), a guru of the Chaitanya (1486–1534) school of Vaishnavism, who, at a time when various interpretations of nondualistic Hindu thought were most prominent, managed to establish a pan-Indian movement for the modern revival of personalist bhakti—a movement that today encompasses both Indian and non-Indian populations throughout the world. The Introduction provides a brief history of Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī's life and history.

This chapter examines the thesis of “Vaishnava decline” forwarded by colonial administrators, Christian missionaries, Orientalists, and the reformed section of nineteenth-century Hindu society in Bengal. It analyses arguments about religious decline to show that these were part of evangelical and teleological worldviews wherein Vaishnava traditions, with its erotic aspects and mythico-poetic dimensions, could not fit. These views, however, shaped nineteenth-century opinions about Vaishnavism held by educated and upper-caste Bengalis, thereby setting the tone for Vaishnava reform and recovery—charted in the subsequent chapters of the book. The chapter also gives a brief account of the life of Chaitanya and the spread of Vaishnavism between 1486 and 1800.

Shri Bishnupriya Patrika was one of the earliest Vaishnava periodicals in Bengal, published by the stridently anticolonial Amrita Bazar Patrika publishing house. The chapter analyses this key journal and its contribution to the making of middle-class Vaishnavism in a period of rising anticolonialism. The chapter argues that the journal channelized the religious aspects of Vaishnava devotion into an instrument of self-pride and assertion against the colonizer. It did so by (a) making Chaitanya into an icon for Bengal, (b) turning Vaishnava material culture (such as manuscripts and sacred spaces, performance traditions and mendicants) into integral aspects of Bengali national culture, and (c) by making the recovery and protection of Vaishnava material culture and history the basis of collective organization and community building in late nineteenth-century Bengal. These efforts culminated in the public celebration of Chaitanya’s birth anniversary as a devotional procession in the heart of Calcutta in 1899.

In 1888, Kedarnath Datta Bhaktivinoda Thakur discovered the site of Chaitanya’s nativity in a place that is now called Mayapur. This chapter examines Datta’s biography as a colonial bureaucrat and a Gaudiya theologian to argue that the search for the birthplace was as much a result of the empiricism of the times as it was due to the anomie produced from a colonized subjectivity of a middle-class, salaried life. It analyzes how religious ideas about sacred space within Vaishnavism were crucial to the determination of Mayapur as the precise birthplace of Chaitanya. By drawing attention to the simultaneous appeal of miraculous visions, sacred geographies, and positivist determinations in the Mayapur episode, this chapter makes evident a different aspect of bhadralok Vaishnavism than what has been seen in the book thus far.

This chapter raises certain fundamental theoretical questions about the relationship between Chaitanya and his message as well as the movement that developed after him. For instance, it questions the tendency often found in current literature to conflate ‘Bengal Vaishnavism’ (Gaudiya Vaishnavism) and ‘Bengali Vaishnavism’. While the Vaishnavism of Chaitanya was certainly popular in Bengal, not all Bengalis could be said to adhere to the religious ideas and practices associated with Chaitanya. The author argues that Chaitanya or Gaudiya Vaishnavism is but one of the several sub-streams of Vaishnavism known to Bengal, and that it is better described as the ‘dominant’ and not ‘quintessential’ form of Vaishnavism for this region. This chapter also undertakes a broad historiographical survey of Chaitanya studies to date and a critical study of the social and historical context in which Chaitanya’s life and work was framed by successive generations of scholars.

Shrivatsa Goswami examines the ways in which Gopāl Bhaṭṭ, interacting with Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and being a southerner by birth, played a key role in establishing the philosophical perspectives and ritual practices that characterized the new Gaudiya sampradaya being formed at Vrindavan in the first half of the sixteenth century. In doing so, he analyses important features of Gopal Bhatt’s two major works, the Ṣat-Sandarbha (Six Treatises) often mistakenly attributed to Jīva Gosvāmī, and the Haribhaktivilāsa (The Pleasure of Worshiping Hari). It emerges, among other things, that there is an element of mystery as to how Gopāl Bhaṭṭ’s philosophical statements relate to his pronouncements on devotional practice.

This chapter highlights different conceptualizations of akshara described by Swaminarayan in the Vachanamrut, and surveys its usage by Shankara, Ramanuja, Madhva, and Swaminarayan as understood by BAPS Swaminarayan Hindus. It pays special attention to the aspect of akshara as guru as emphasized by Swaminarayan in the Vachanamrut and draws connections with the concept of the ideal devotee as discussed in the traditions of Ramanuja and Chaitanya.

This chapter shows how innovation emerges in one of Vrindavan’s most influential religious lineages, the Chaitanya or Gaudiya community that traces its origins back to the sixteenth century when Vrindavan emerged as a built presence on the banks of the Yamuna. In the West the best-known figure in the Gaudiya community is undoubtedly the founder of ISKCON, but in India Shrivatsa Goswami is almost equally renowned. Shrivatsa’s father was a major innovator in the generation just past; we watch Shrivatsa perform his funeral rites. How does Shrivatsa, a person with global connections, represent the old and the new Vrindavan at once?