It interrogates why Sant bhajans might be relevant and appealing to Indians from so many backgrounds and how these bhajans and their performers are relevant to major cultural, religious, and social discourses in India today. It further addresses the role of Sant bhajans in the formation of new communities comprising members from previously disparate social groups. This dissertation follows performers and songs from Malwa into new contexts and explores the processes by which performers and audiences in diverse styles and contexts use Sant bhajans to construct understandings of the self. Malwa’s bhajan singers have also become part of India’s popular religious and musical life as certain performers have attained celebrity status and been recognized at the national level as living bearers of the Sant tradition.

This tradition was largely unheard-of half a century ago, but is now a major part of Malwa’s cultural life that has facilitated the creation of lower-caste spiritual networks and created a space for those networks to engage in discourse about social issues. It highlights a specific tradition in the Central Indian region of Malwa based on poetry by Kabir and other Sants (anti-establishment poet-saints) performed by lower-caste singers. This dissertation draws on fieldwork conducted over 2014-2015 with contemporary bhajan performers from many different genres and styles throughout India. Countless regional traditions of bhajans (devotional songs) have been able to maintain their existence by adapting to serve the contemporary social needs of their participants. The results of one publisher’s effort and investment, and of significant reorganisation of material from manuscript sources, these booklets have been extremely popular and lasting products in the extensive market for religious material, clearly a crucial technology for individual and group religious practice (bhajan), before which the lineages’ own publishing efforts pale into quasi-insignificance.įor centuries, the songs of devotional poet-saints have been an integral part of Indian religious life. Halfway between oral bhajan groups and the scholarly publications of the collected works (granthavali) of Sant poets, throughout the twentieth century the Belvedere Press booklets have commanded tremendous currency as religious print-objects in the Hindi devotional public sphere.

It examines its scope, aims, and methods as well as its religious orientation and conceptualisation of a religious-devotional public in early-twentieth-century North India. This essay focuses on the most systematic and long-lived project of publishing Sant orature (bani), the Santbānī-Pustakmālā of the Belvedere Press, Allahabad. But this covers only a small part of the story of religious print, which extends well beyond reformist groups. The story of print and religious publics in colonial India has largely been told as one of reformist groups and religious polemics.

Kabir ke pad in hindi arth sahit pdf