Śiva's Saints

Description

Today numbering more than twelve million people, the Vīraśaivas constitute a vibrant south-Indian community renowned for its bhakti (devotional) religiosity and for its entrenched resistance to traditional Brahminical values. For eight centuries this tradition produced a vast and original body of literature, composed mostly in the Kannada language.
Śiva's Saints introduces the Ragaḷegaḷu, a foundational and previously unexplored work produced in the early thirteenth century. As the first written narrative about the traditions progenitors, this work inaugurated a new era of devotional narratives accessible to wide audiences in the Kannada-speaking region.
By closely reading the saints stories in the Ragaḷegaḷu, Gil Ben-Herut takes a more nuanced historical view than commonly-held notions about the egalitarian and iconoclastic nature of the early tradition. Instead, Ben-Herut argues that the early Śiva-devotion movement in the region was less radical and more accommodating toward traditional religious, social, and political institutions than thought today. In contrast to the narrowly sectarian and exclusionary vision that shapes later accounts, the Ragaḷegaḷu is characterized by an opposite impulse, offering an open invitation to people from all walks of life, whose stories illustrate the richness of their devotional lives. Analysis of this seminal text yields important insights into the role of literary representation of the social and political development of a religious community in a pre-modern and non-Western milieu.

About the Author

Dr. Gil Ben-Herut is an Assistant Professor in the Religious Studies Department, University of South Florida. His research interests include pre-modern religious literature in the Kannada language, South-Asian bhakti (devotional) traditions, and the vernacularization of Sanskrit poetics and courtly literature.

Reviews

"Ben-Herut is an essential voice in the critical historiography of devotion or bhakti in India. His study of a lively set of stories about medieval Śaiva Kannada saints conveys the complexity of publics of devotion as people grappled with difficult problems of social ethics, religious difference, and otherness. If anyone is still questioning how to use religious texts to write compelling social and cultural history, read this book and you'll have your answer." - Christian Novetzke, author of Religion and Public Memory
"Śiva's Saints is a fascinating study that marks a genuine contribution to scholarly understanding of an important, yet oft-overlooked, religious tradition of southern India. Gil Ben-Herut displays deep knowledge of his primary sources, and he offers a compelling argument for a more nuanced historical view of the early centuries of Kannada-language Śaiva devotion." - Anne E. Monius, Professor of South Asian Religions, Harvard Divinity School
"This absorbing, truly pioneering book takes us back to the earliest known life-stories of the Vīraśaiva community of southern India'Protestants' before Hus or Luther, famous for their feistiness and devotion to egalitarian community. Ben-Herut shows that here as in Europe the egalitarian characterization cannot really stand up to historical scrutiny. The terrain is more complex and diverse. But the diversity itself is fascinating—and the feistiness is undiminished." - Jack Hawley, author of A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement

Table of contents

Introduction
Chapter 1: The Poetics of Bhakti
Chapter 2: Who is a Bhakta?
Chapter 3: The Society of Devotees
Chapter 4: A Bhakti Guide for the Perplexed Brahmin
Chapter 5: The King's Fleeting Authority and His Menacing Vaisnava Brahmins
Chapter 6: Jains as the Intimate, Wholly Other
Conclusion>/i>