Siting and Experiencing Cultures of Devotion in Colonial Bengal

Abstract

These two books masterfully focus on Vaishnavism in modern Bengal in new ways. Both draw mostly on the work of scholars publishing in the last decade of the twentieth century and first decade of the twenty-first, in order to dig further into this important regional (and now transnational) movement with questions no one has raised before. Each author looks at the movement with different, but overlapping, concerns. In Unforgetting Chaitanya, Varuni Bhatia differentiates from the start between the Gaudiya Vaishnavism of the goswamis who relocated to Vrindavan and formulated the movement’s official theology, and Bengali Vaishnavism, which she describes as “the multiplicity of devotional life-worlds associated with the figure of Chaitanya, as well as with the complex of Radha-Krishna worship in the Bengali-speaking region of the subcontinent” (17). She explicitly wants to “relocate Chaitanya and the Vaishnavism that draws from his devotional legacies back into Bengal” (18). This is an important move to make, for while it is fair to say that Chaitanya, or at least his name, bears responsibility for the development of the tradition, its manifestation on its home turf of Bengal differs in many ways from what we can see in Vrindavan. Scholars such as Alan Entwistle and David Haberman have written extensively on Vrindavan from an ethnographic standpoint. A few have published on the lives and legacies of individuals