About Book
The six poets presented here-Ravidas, Kabir, Nanak, Surdas, Mirabai, and Tulsidas-have contributed more to the religious vocabulary of Hinduism in north India today than any voices before or since. In worship, in education, even in politics, modern Hinduism sings their tune. For half a millennium, these saints' poems have circulated from the banks of the Jumna to the rice fields of Bihar and back to the deserts of Rajasthan, providing a language for many of life's most vivid concerns-cruelty and loneliness, status and intimacy, hope and infatuation, and the maddening transitoriness of it all. With a biographical and interpretive essay on each poet and a selection of representative verses in original translation, this book offers a complete introduction to a literature that transcends the boundaries we associate with religion and those of India as well.
About Author
MARK JUERGENSMEYER is director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, professor of sociology, and affiliate professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is an expert on religious violence, conflict resolution and South Asian religion and politics, and has published more than two hundred articles and twenty books. His latest book, Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State (University of California Press, 2008) covers the rise of religious activism from al Qaeda to the Christian militia, and explores its confrontation with secular modernity. It is based on his earlier book, The New Cold War? named by the New York Times as one of the notable books of the year. His widely-read Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (University of California Press, revised edition 2003), is based on interviews with religious activists around the world--including individuals convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, leaders of Hamas, and abortion clinic bombers in the United States--and was listed by the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times as one of the best nonfiction books of the year. His book on Gandhian conflict resolution has been reprinted as Gandhi's Way (University of California Press, Updated Edition, 2005), and was selected as Community Book of the Year at the University of California, Davis. He has edited The Oxford Handbook of Global Religions (Oxford University Press 2006) and Religion in Global Civil Society (Oxford University Press 2005). He is co-editing two encyclopedias--one in global religion and the other in global studies--and is co-editing the Princeton Reader in Religion and Violence. His 2006 Stafford Little Lectures at Princeton University, God and War, will also be published by Princeton University Press.
John Stratton Hawley is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Religion at Barnard College. He is the editor of Saints and Virtues and Devi: Goddesses of India (both from UC Press), among other books. Vasudha Narayanan is Professor of Religion at University of Florida. Her books include The Tamil Veda: Pillan's Interpretation of the Tiruvaymoli and The Vernacular Veda: Revelation, Recitation, and Ritu