Devotional Visualities: Seeing Bhakti in Indic Material Cultures (Bloomsbury Studies in Material Religion) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1350214221 ISBN 13: 9781350214224

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025

Synopsis

This open access book is the first to focus on material visualities of bhakti imagery that inspire, shape, convey, and expand both the visual practices of devotional communities, as well as possibilities for extending the reach of devotion in society in new and often unexpected ways. Communities of interpreters of bhakti images discussed in this book include not only a number of distinctive Hindu bhakti groups, but also artisans, diaspora women, South Asian Sufis, businessmen, dancers, and filmmakers. This book’s identification of devotional practices of looking, such as materializing memory, mirroring and immaterializing portraits, and shaping the return look, connect material and visual cultures as well as illustrate modes of established and experimental image usage. Bhakti is one of the most-studied aspects of Indic devotionalism on account of its expression through emotive poetry, song, and vivid hagiographies of saints. The diverse devotional visualities analyzed in this book meaningfully circulate bhakti images in past and present, generating their renewed relationship to contemporary concerns. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Patrice M. and John F. Kelly Fellowship in Arts & Letters at Drew University, USA.

About this title

About the Authors

Karen Pechilis is NEH Distinguished Professor of Humanities and Professor of Comparative Religion at Drew University, USA. She is the author of Interpreting Devotion: The Poetry and Legacy of a Female Bhakti Saint of India (2011), The Graceful Guru: Hindu Female Gurus in India and the United States (2004), and The Embodiment of Bhakti (1999). She is co-editor of South Asian Religions: Tradition and Today (2012), and is on the advisory editorial boards of the International Journal of Hindu Studies, the International Journal of Dharma Studies, andReligion and Gender.

Amy-Ruth Holt is an independent scholar based in the USA.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1350214221
• ISBN 13: 9781350214224
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 332
• Editor: Pechilis Karen