The Place of Devotion: Siting and Experiencing Divinity in Bengal-Vaishnavism

Abstract

Luminos is the open access monograph publishing program from UC Press. Luminos provides a framework for preserving and reinvigorating monograph publishing for the future and increases the reach and visibility of important scholarly work. Titles published in the UC Press Luminos model are published with the same high standards for selection, peer review, production, and marketing as those in our traditional program. www.luminosoa.orgThe Place of Devotion South aSia acroSS the diSciplineS South Asia Across the Disciplines is a series devoted to publishing first books across a wide range of South Asian studies, including art, history, philology or textual studies, philosophy, religion, and the interpretive social sciences. Series authors all share the goal of opening up new archives and suggesting new methods and approaches, while demonstrating that South Asian scholarship can be at once deep in expertise and broad in appeal.

Place Spirituality in the imaginary locus

“…So place attachment may come through sheer imagination of a place associated with one’s devotional object. Sarbadhikary (2015) presents narratives of modern devotees, illustrating the psychologically intense significance of attachment to the secret and sacred Vrindaban (whether in person or in imagination) among the Vaishnavas up to the present.…”

The Mystical World of the Body in the Bengali Tantric Work Nigūḍhārthaprakāśāvali

“…bhuvaner madhye ache yata adhikārī deha madhye ghat .ā ilā tāhā ye vicāri. 48 An interesting but speculative theory is to correlate such phenomena cognized in the visions of the internal body like lights, waves, flowers or wires with the phosphens (see McDougall 1977 (Sarbadhikary 2015, p. 114, see also Openshaw 2004.…”

Mountain, Water, Rock, God: Understanding Kedarnath in the Twenty-First Century

“…Some voices in this conversation theorize affect as something produced through processes in which humans are merely part of larger events that include a range of animate and inanimate entities (see, e.g., Lorimer 2008); this calls to mind Casey's sense of gathering. Scholars looking at place in South Asian contexts have begun to harness these theoretical tools as well (see, e.g., Sarbadhikary 2015).…”

“…If it can be termed a form of spirituality or religion, then it is an intensely material spirituality or religion. Scholars of place and pilgrimage in South Asia are to some extent already attentive to the experience of this connectedness (see, for example, Eck 2012Sarbadhikary 2015). I want to emphasize the prakritic weight of this connectedness and show how it might affect how people experience and engage ecological issues, and how understanding of such matters can be achieved through close attention to specific places.…”