Studies in South Asian Devotional Literature

by Alan W. Entwistle and Francoise Mallison

The Fifth Conference on Devotional Literature in New Indo-Aryan Languages was convened under the auspices of the Ecole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient, Paris, from July 9th-12th, 1991. The conference brought, together some seventy participants. This volume contains all but four of the thirty-six papers and reports that were presented at the Paris conference. The field of research they represent, namely pre-modern literary expressions of "devotion" is vast and varied. Topics dealt with include the classical sources of medieval bhakti, the relationship between politics and devotionalism, popular bhakti traditions, Islam and bhakti, hagiography, iconography, and such aspects of textual study as the stylistic and metrical analysis of devotional lyrics and their transmission through manuscripts and other means. Among the sectarian traditions, most attention is paid to the Krishna cult and Sant movements. One paper is exceptional in being the first in this series of conferences of concern itself with Jainism and the only contribution that deals with sources in a Dravidian language.