How do we evaluate records associated with the great poet-saints of early modern north India, both life-stories and poetic anthologies?
Professor John Stratton Hawley will discuss the combination of methods and approaches that have contributed to his various studies of bhakti, including his recent book on the idea of the Bhakti movement. These methods include manuscript research, oral history, the analysis of visual documents, and contemporary rapportage. The range of sources is deliberately wide: collective biographies (especially the Bhaktamals of Nabhadas and Raghavdas), works organized around the motif of the Digvijaya, anthologies of poetry, visual resources (miniature paintings, murals painted on public buildings), conference proceedings, interviews, and textbooks used in India today.
Questions of public memory and religious sensitivity fundamentally affect his work.
This program is part of the 'Historical Methods Seminar Series' co-hosted by the Columbia Global Centers | Mumbai and the South Asia Institute at Columbia University in partnership with the Mumbai History Teachers Academy.
About the speaker: