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This chapter examines how despite the historical influences of vegetarian Vaishnava traditions, Jainism, the salience of Mahatma Gandhi in Gujarat, and its current index of the abject, meat eating is not simply associated with disgust. It also carries great potency, and can signify power. If meat eating was on the one hand identified with vice and with groups considered backward, it could alternatively also be associated with erotic attraction and an alluring potency, modern decadence, and cosmopolitan freedom—an association gaining ground especially among the young. The dual valence of meat is acutely present in how members of lower-caste groups explain, legitimize, and rationalize their own practices of meat consumption or abstention.

This chapter focuses on the Sikh response to the Vaishnava bhakti tradition. It examines the two hymns of Jaidev, although he has not received any direct comment from the Sikh Gurus. He is specifically chosen to address the question of whether the author of these two hymns is identical with the author of the celebrated Vaishnava text Gitagovinda. The chapter also discusses two Vaishnava saints, Surdas and Mira Bai. In particular, it considers the single line of Surdas in the Sarang raga that has received a direct comment from Guru Arjan. It also looks at the reasons why Mira Bai's hymn in the Maru raga was deleted from the Adi Granth.

This introductory chapter focuses on a complicated traditional theology that is centered on the divinity of Vishnu, or Krishna. It first discusses the concept of faith, and then introduces Tamal Krishna Goswami, who was one of the primary religious leaders and teachers of the Hindu-Vaishnava order in the world. The discussion shifts to Goswami's teacher, A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the founder of the Hare Krishna Movement, or the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON). This chapter also examines the main focus of Goswami's work—the central aspects of Prabhupada's “living theology”—and presents a brief look at Goswami's early life and career, as well as the methods that were used to complete the present work.

This chapter identifies the main forces that influenced Prabhupada's thought and also shows how his parents, college education, discipleship, and upbringing influenced his work. It describes the earlier teachers of Vaishnava in Bengal, looks at Prabhupada's efforts as an authoritative commentator, and identifies what impressed Prabhupada most about his guru, Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī. This chapter ends with an analysis that combines the roles of the disciplic succession, the founder-ācārya, and ISKCON in Prabhupada's theological formulation.

This chapter introduces the story of the deities Balaram and the Yamuna River, which offers an honest reckoning with human dependence on the earth for sustenance and human entitlements to the earth's production in the context of Balaram's multiple obligations to the earth, his family, and his subjects. It situates Balaram's story in its geographical, religious, and cultural contexts, defines relevant terms and concepts from the Hindu tradition, and explains why devotees understand Balaram as a protector, agriculturalist, and guardian. This story both helps us recognize how a disconnect with the origins of our food both enable and result from assumptions—whether conscious or not—of entitlement to the earth's resources and helps us question why narratives that appear to justify aggression towards the earth prove so enduring. Exploring the moral aspects of food and food production bring this dilemma home and demonstrates that how and why we tell stories about agriculture must be central to our lives.

This chapter demonstrates parallels between the pastoral paradigm of Vaishnava devotion and the neglect of agriculture in Western environmental thought. It explores how pastoralism and idealized landscapes can create an idyllic view of the natural world and obscures our debt to the earth for subsistence or our reciprocal obligations. For example, both the Braj pastoral and the trope of wilderness in environmental discourse in the United States romanticize the natural world and exclude the possibility of human intervention in the land. Vaishnava pastoralism and Western environmental thought both emphasize romanticized and urbanized views of the natural world that exclude labor, production, and violence. By exploring the role of agriculture in the context of religion, nature, and society, we can understand the persistence of certain stories.

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.

This chapter returns briefly to Raj's autobiography in order to situate it in the context of the manuscript of which it forms a part, as well as in the context of ‘life-writing’ in India and specifically Bengal. It begins with some preliminary remarks on the Jīban-carit (JC) in the context of the manuscript. It considers the purposes such a manuscript would have served for someone in Raj's position. The chapter then discusses the JC, why it was written, and the autobiographical genre, the JC and Euro-American definitions of ‘autobiography’, Bengali prose autobiographical writing of the nineteenth century, Raj's JC in relation to the Vaishnava renouncer tradition, and Raj's JC in relation to autobiographies of other Bauls and Bartaman-panthis. The Mangal Kabya tradition has also been examined.

This chapter discusses Bhaktisiddhānta's transnational attempt to propagate Caitanya Vaishnavism by sending disciples to London and Berlin in the 1930s. In this regard, it provides a fairly detailed description and analysis of their encounter with imperial Britain and Nazi Germany, as well as the manner in which they carried forth Bhaktisiddhānta's message. The Gaudiya Math's venture marked the earliest attempt of a Vaishnava institution to establish itself in Europe. Its intellectual foundation consisted of English language literatures that in some respects provided a more authentic understanding of Vaishnava bhakti than that which had been thus far presented in the writings of Christian scholars and Indologists. The Gaudiya mission attracted the attention of both British and German scholars, and even managed to kindle serious interest among a few others. Bhaktisiddhānta sought to provide a genuine alternative to the nondualistic understanding of Hinduism that had come to predominate, particularly within the Anglo-Saxon cultural sphere.

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.

The chapter maps the field of Vaishnava traditions in nineteenth-century Bengal to show the plural and myriad worlds that these traditions operated in—worlds that the emerging middle-class and educated Bengali Vaishnava would actively seek to disciple and define. The chapter follows closely from the argument extended in the first chapter, about the discursive nature of the “decline” thesis, and seeks to fill in the gaps that the reader may have about precisely what was being read as “decline” in the first place. Weaving together colonial sources alongside biographies, autobiographies, fiction, and information derived from contemporary periodicals, the chapter demonstrates the plurality of nineteenth-century Bengali Vaishnava worlds: its sacred spaces, musical traditions, myriad “sects,” charismatic gurus, and their old and new patrons. This chapter illustrates how crucial the study of Vaishnava traditions is to understanding caste and gender relations in Bengal.

Bengali Vaishnava traditions were most foundationally re-evaluated by the bhadralok in the process of writing literary histories of Bengali language. These histories, which began to emerge around 1870s and continued well into the twentieth century, are discussed in this chapter, with a focus on the decades before and after the Swadeshi moment (1905) in anticolonial politics of India. The chapter argues that Bengali Vaishnavism and Chaitanya’s abiding status in Bengali imagination (one which continues until this day)—the former, as the repository of literary greatness, and the latter as a Luther-like Hindu religious reformer—was put together in these decades, specifically by antiquarians, collectors, and archivists such as Dinesh Chandra Sen, who tirelessly worked to discover and bring to light the literary pasts of the Bengali language.

The sixth chapter examines Narasinha's songs and hagiography as a vital source of moral inspiration for Gandhi and their constructive use by him in public life. Looking closely at Gandhi's writings and speeches, the chapter discusses how he provided a model for engaging with songs and stories from the Narasinha tradition as inspirational cultural resources for social reform. A special consideration is given to the song Vaiṣṇava jana to, which became internationally popular as an inspirational song because of Gandhi, and to the term “Harijan” (people of God), which he adopted from a Narasinha song to refer to the “untouchables” of Hindu society, leading to bitter debates. This chapter illustrates the potential of the songs and sacred biographies of popular saint-poets of India to serve as inspirational cultural resources beyond devotional contexts.

Chapter 2 provides an introduction and discussion of Sudhā’s peritext as well as of Gaṅgā Pustak Mālā and Sudhā’s contributors, objectives, customer care, and marketing strategies. It begins with a horizontal reading of the periodical, showing how it consisted of two major parts that disseminated knowledge through the essay and through poetry and fiction offering a blend of ‘education’ and ‘entertainment’ (Part I) and through a diversity of more practically oriented columns, one of which was a readers’ digest and a lengthy editorial, which also offered a blend of entertaining and educational knowledge (Part II). It considers the periodical’s visual layout as central to understanding its positioning as modern while also being rooted in Vaishnava tradition and devotion towards Rama and Krishna in particular. The visuals are also indicative of new conceptualizations of women in liminal spaces and their relationship to the publishing world in the Hindi public sphere.