Devotional Visualities: Seeing Bhakti in Indic Material Cultures

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This 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 volume include not only a number of distinctive Hindu bhakti groups, but also artisans, diaspora women, South Asian Sufis, businessmen, dancers, and filmmakers. As theorized in recent scholarship, `visuality' is an imaged materiality that shapes reality and does not just reflect it. This volumes 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. To date, there have been many publications on bhakti texts, but none centrally focused on Indic devotional visualities that engage bhakti imagery. The diverse devotional visualities analyzed in this volume meaningfully circulate bhakti images in past and present, generating their renewed relationship to contemporary concerns.

Author Bio

Karen Pechilis is Distinguished Professor of Humanities and Professor of History of Religions at Drew University, USA. She is General Editor of A Cultural History of Hinduism (Bloomsbury, Forthcoming). Amy-Ruth Holt is an independent scholar who holds a Ph.D. in South Asian art history from The Ohio State University, USA.