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By Varuni Bhatia

What position do pre-modern spiritual traditions play within the formation of recent secular identities? In Unforgetting Chaitanya, Varuni Bhatia examines late-nineteenth-century variations of Bengali Vaishnavism-a vivid and multifaceted spiritual culture that strains its origins to the 15th century Krishna devotee Chaitanya (1486-1533). Drawing on an in depth physique of hitherto unexamined archival fabric, Bhatia unearths that either non secular modernizers and secular voices one of the Bengali middle-class invoked Chaitanya, portraying him concurrently as an area hero, a Hindu reformer, and as God almighty. She argues that those claims may be understood relating to the restoration of a "pure" Bengali tradition and historical past in a interval of nascent, yet emerging, anti-colonialism within the region.

Who is a real Vaishnava? within the past due 19th century, this query assumed urgency as debates round questions of authenticity seemed prominently within the Bengali public sphere. those debates went on for years, even a long time, inflicting unbridgeable rifts in own friendships and tarnishing reputations of proven students. Underlying those debates used to be the query of authoritative Bengali Vaishnavism and its function within the long term structure of Bengali tradition and society. At stake, argues Bhatia, was once the very nature and composition of an indigenously-derived modernity inscribed during the politics of authenticity, which allowed an influential element of Hindu, upper-caste Bengalis to excavate their very own explicitly Hindu pasts so as to discover a people's historical past, a non secular reformer, a casteless Hindu sect, the richest examples of Bengali literature, and a cosmopolitan expression of monotheistic religion.

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