About the Editors and Contributors
Editors
Maya Burger
Maya Burger is professor of Indian Studies at the Department of Languages and Civilization of South Asia in the Faculty of Arts (Lausanne). Her main areas of research are early modern literature (Hindi), the history of yoga, and the relations between India and Europe. Maya Burger studied anthropology, history of religions and Indology in Switzerland, India and USA. With Nadia Cattoni, she established the Lausanne platform for Early New Indo-Aryan Digitized Texts (ENIAT). She has published, for example, on translation (India in Translation, 2010, with N. Pozza); on literary and visual studies (e.g. The Perception of the Elements in the Hindu Traditions, 1999, with P. Schreiner); further areas of interest are early women press, bhakti and the arts. Recently she contributed to Yoga in Transformation (2018) with ‘Sāṃkhya in Transcultural Interpretation: Shri Anirvan (Śrī Anirvāṇa) and Lizelle Reymond’ and she prepares the edition of India and Switzerland with Ph. Bornet and A. Malinar (forthcoming).
Nadia Cattoni
Nadia Cattoni is a SNF Postdoctoral Fellow in the DSAAM at University Ca’Foscari of Venice and a scientific collaborator at University of Lausanne. She received her PhD from University of Lausanne in 2016 for a thesis on the rīti poet Dev. Her research areas are Sanskrit and Hindi literature, with a focus on courtly poetry, erotics, aesthetics and women writing. Her current project ‘Eroticism and Sexuality in Pre-modern India. Interpretation of Sanskrit kāmaśāstras in the Braj literary tradition’ considers how the composition of texts on sexology was maintained and transformed through vernacular literatures. Interested in the representation of feminine figures in literature and painting, she is the author of ‘The Figure of Radha in Miniature Paintings: From the Pastoral to the Courtly, from Text to Visuality, from Polyphony to Normativity’ (2015). Her book Dev, l’artisan-poète du 18ème siècle et la nāyikā dans le Rasavilāsa. Circulation et échanges, intertextualité et transformations will be published in 2019.
Contributors
Imre Bangha
Imre Bangha is Associate Professor of Hindi at the University of Oxford. He studied Indology in Budapest and holds a PhD in Hindi from Visva-Bharati. His published books include Saneh ko mārag (1999), a monograph in Hindi on Ānandghan (Ghan Ānand), and Scorpion in the Hand (2014), a critical edition of Ṭhākur’s poetry. He is editor of Bhakti Beyond the Forest (2013), a volume based on the 10th International Bhakti Conference: Early Modern Literatures in North India held in 2009. He is presently working on an edition of old Hindi texts, as well as a monograph titled Mother Tongue: The Emergence of the Hindi Literary Tradition: c. 1350–1520.
Allison Busch
Allison Busch is Associate Professor of Hindi Literature in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. She received her PhD in Hindi literature from the University of Chicago in 2003. Her expertise is in the early modern period (c. 1550–1850), with a special interest in courtly India. Her book Poetry of Kings (2011) aimed to reframe conversations in Hindi studies about the Mughal and Rajput literary pasts. A recent co-edited volume (with Thomas de Bruijn), Culture and Circulation: Literature in Motion in Early Modern India (2014), draws together essays by leading scholars of Hindi, Bengali, Persian, and Marathi literature in an attempt to foster conversations about the importance of multilingualism and literary cross-pollination in the Indian milieu.
She is the author of numerous articles and works with Molly Aitken on an interdisciplinary project called “Aesthetic Worlds of the Indian Heroine”.
John E. Cort
John E. Cort is Professor of Asian and Comparative Religions at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, USA. He is the author of many articles on the Jains, as well as Jains in the World: Religious Values and Ideology in India (2001) and Framing the Jina: Narratives of Icons and Idols in Jain History (2010). He is one of the associate editors of the forthcoming Brill's Encyclopedia of Jainism. His articles are included in the volumes from the 10th and 11th ICEMLNI meetings: ‘God Outside and God Inside: North Indian Digambar Jain Performance of Bhakti’ in Bhakti Beyond the Forest: Current Research on Early Modern Literatures in North India, 2003-2009 (2013); and ‘This is How We Play Holī’: Allegory in North Indian Digambar Jain Holī Songs,’ in Texts and Traditions in Early Modern North India (2018).
Tillo Detige
Tillo Detige has master’s degrees in fine arts (KASK Gent) and Eastern languages and cultures (Ghent University). In recent years, he has taught at Ghent University and conducted research on Digambara Jainism in Western and Central India, in particular, the early modern bhaṭṭāraka lineages. He travelled widely in the region, visiting sites and collecting epigraphic and manuscript materials, whilst also studying aspects of contemporary Digambara traditions. Partly published and with more in preparation, his research output forms an extended argument for a thorough revision of the prevalent historiographical framing of early modern Digambara Jainism as a distinct and deficient ‘Bhaṭṭāraka era.’
Arthur Dudney
Arthur Dudney is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge. His current project, ‘Making Persianate People: Histories of Literary Education beyond Iran,’ considers how literary Persian was spread and maintained in the vast region where it had cultural currency but was not a mother tongue. Previously he was Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Early-Modern Indian Cultures of Knowledge at the University of Oxford. He received his PhD from the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University in 2013. Dudney is the author of Delhi: Pages for a Forgotten History (2015) and the forthcoming India in the Persian World of Letters, and several peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on Hindi-Urdu and Persian literary culture and intellectual history.
Daniel Gold
Daniel Gold (PhD Chicago) is Professor of South Asian Religions and Chair of the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. He has worked broadly in contemporary and early modern North Indian religion as well as in the study of religion. His books include The Lord as Guru: Hindi Sants in North Indian Tradition (1987); Comprehending the Guru: Towards a Grammar of Religious Perception (1988); Aesthetics and Analysis in Writing on Religion: Modern Fascinations (2003); and Provincial Hinduism: Religion and Community in Gwalior City (2015). In recent years he has given renewed attention to the North Indian Sants, about whom he has written several new articles, including ‘The Hindi Sants’ Two Yogic Paths to the Formless Lord’ (2015) and ‘Spiritual Heroes, Miracle Tales, and Ramsnehi Foundations’ (2018)—both fully referenced in his chapter here.
John S. Hawley
John Stratton Hawley—informally, Jack—is Claire Tow Professor of Religion at Barnard College, Columbia University. His most recent books on India’s bhakti traditions are A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement (2015), Sur’s Ocean (with Kenneth Bryant, 2015), Into Sur’s Ocean (2016), and an expanded, art-oriented edition of Surdas: Poet, Singer, Saint (2018). A Storm of Songs received the A. K. Coomaraswamy Book Prize of the Association for Asian Studies in 2017; Sur’s Ocean, the A. K. Ramanujan Prize for Translation in 2018. Jack has been a Guggenheim Fellow and Fulbright-Nehru Fellow, and has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Monika Horstmann
Monika Horstmann (aka Monika Boehm-Tettelbach) retired as Head of the Department of Modern South Asian Languages and Literatures, South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University. Her research focuses on early modern North Indian literatures and religious movements and on the interface between religion and politics. Recent publications include ‘Nāth and Dādūpanthi Critique of Jains’ (2017), ‘The Mālik in Rāmānandī Documents of the 18th and 19th Centuries’ (2018), ‘Aurangzeb in the Perspective of Kachvāhā Literature’ (2018), and ‘Three Brajbhāṣā Versions of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa’ (2018).
Susanne Kempe-Weber
Susanne Kempe-Weber is a doctoral candidate and assistant at the Department of Indian Studies, Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies, University of Zurich, since 2013. She is the author of ‘Representing Spiritual Authority in the Biśnoī Sampradāya according to the Sabadavāṇī’ (2015).
Anne Murphy
Anne Murphy (PhD Columbia) is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Studies and co-Director of the Centre for India and South Asia Research at the University of British Columbia. She teaches and conducts research on the vernacular literary and religious traditions of the Punjab region (India and Pakistan). Current research pursues two interrelated lines of inquiry: modern Punjabi cultural production in the Indian and Pakistani Punjabs and in the diaspora, and the early modern history of Punjabi's emergence as a literary language. Her monograph, The Materiality of the Past: History and Representation in Sikh Tradition (2012), explored the construction of Sikh historical consciousness within texts, objects and religious sites from the eighteenth century to the present, and a thematically related volume entitled Time, History, and the Religious Imaginary in South Asia (2011). She pursued her continuing interests in commemoration and memorial practices in a volume entitled Partition and the Practice of Memory (2018) co-edited with Churnjeet Mahn (Strathclyde University). She has published articles in History and Theory, Studies in Canadian Literature, South Asian History and Culture, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and other journals.
Hiroko Nagasaki
Hiroko Nagasaki, PhD, is Associate Professor in Hindi at Osaka University. Her main research area is early Hindi devotional literature and Hindi chand śāstra (metrics). She is the editor of Indian and Persian Prosody and Recitation (2012) and has contributed chapters on Hindi bhakti literature in Bhakti Beyond the Forest (2013) and Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India (2018). She has translated into Japanese poetry by Tulsīdās, Abdurrahīm ‘Khānkhānā,’ and Raskhān, and the hagiography of Tulsīdās (Mūl Gosāīṃ Carita).
Heidi Pauwels
Heidi Pauwels is Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her publications include two monographs on sixteenth-century bhakti: Krishna's Round Dance Reconsidered (1996) and In Praise of Holy Men (2002), and one comparing classical, medieval and contemporary film and television retellings of the stories of Kṛṣṇa and Rāma: The Goddess as Role Model: Sītā and Rādhā in Scripture and on Screen (2008). She is editor of Indian Literature and Popular Cinema (2007), Patronage and Popularisation, Pilgrimage and Procession (2009), and Satire in the age of Early Modernity (with Monika Horstmann, 2012) and a special issue of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society on vernacular views of Aurangzeb (with Anne Murphy, 2018). As a result of her Guggenheim project on Kishangarh, she has most recently published Cultural Exchange in Eighteenth-Century India: Poetry and Paintings from Kishangarh (2015) and Mobilizing Krishna’s World (2017).
Galina Rousseva-Sokolova
Galina Rousseva-Sokolova is Associate Professor at Sofia University and O. P. Jindal Global University. She is the author of Jeu et dévotion (2005), numerous articles on premodern North Indian vernacular literature, Hinduism, and cultural history, and several translations from Hindi into French, Bulgarian, and English.
Raman Sinha
Raman Sinha teaches Sanskrit poetics, Western literary theory, Hindi drama and theatre, and philosophy of literary history at the Centre of Indian Languages at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. He has published three books in Hindi: अनुवाद और रचना का उत्तर-जीवन (2002), रामचरितमानस. पाठ : लीला : चित्र : संगीत (2011), शमशेर का संसार (2013). He is the author of several articles and research papers in English and in Hindi and has translated more than 200 poems and some prose pieces from
English and different Indian languages into Hindi and vice versa. His areas of interest include Hindi studies, translation studies, cultural studies, and performing arts.
Marc Tiefenauer
Marc Tiefenauer received his PhD in Indology from the University of Lausanne where he works as the librarian for the Oriental Collections. His research explores eschatological representations in South Asian religions, based on primary sources in Sanskrit, Pali, Ardhamagadhi, Buddhist Chinese, Tibetan, Brajbhāṣā, and Persian. He is the author of the bilingual Les Enfers indiens (The Indian hells), published in 2018 by Brill as part of the Handbook of Oriental Studies series.
Minyu Zhang
Minyu Zhang received his PhD from Peking University in 2016. He is a lecturer in the Department of Area Studies, School of Asian and African Studies, Beijing Foreign Studies University. His main research area is early modern Hindi literature and its socio-historical background. He translated poetry by Kabīr and Sūrdās into Chinese. He is currently investigating the transmission of Kabīrian works through a National Social Science Foundation Early Career Project titled ‘The Study of Kabirian Textual Tradition in the Context of Early Modern Indian History’ (17CWW009).
About the Editors and Contributors
Editors
Maya Burger
Nadia Cattoni
Contributors
Imre Bangha
Allison Busch
John E. Cort
Tillo Detige
Arthur Dudney
Daniel Gold
John S. Hawley
Monika Horstmann
Susanne Kempe-Weber
Anne Murphy
Hiroko Nagasaki
Heidi Pauwels
Galina Rousseva-Sokolova
Raman Sinha
Marc Tiefenauer
Minyu Zhang