introduction. 15
and chaos or duty and play. In generating, performing, and listening to these sto-
ries, Hindus have often experienced themselves as members of a single imagined
family.
Yet simultaneously, once again, these narratives serve as an arena for articulating
tensions. Women performers sometimes tell the Ramayanaas the story of Sita’s tra-
vails at the hands of Rama rather than as a testament of Rama’s righteous victories.
Low-caste musicians of North India present religious epics enacting their own ex-
perience of the world rather than performing their way into the upper-caste milieu
of the Mahabharata,which these epics nonetheless echo. And an influential South
Indian reformer of the early twentieth century went so far as to extol the virtues of
Rama’s enemy, the “demon” Ravana, as a way of rejecting the pan-Indian Brahmin
hegemony he saw embedded in the story as it has usually been told. In relation to
broadly known pan-Hindu, male-centered, upper-caste narrative traditions, these
variants provide both resonance and challenge.
bhakti
Finally, there is a fifth strand that contributes to the complex unity of Hindu expe-
rience through time:bhakti(intense sharing, devoted adoration), a broad tradition
of loving God that is especially associated with the lives and words of vernacular
poet-saints throughout India. Devotional poems attributed to these inspired figures,
who represent both sexes and all social classes, have elaborated a store of images
and moods to which access can be had in a score of languages. Individual poems are
sometimes strikingly similar from one language or century to another, without
there being any trace of mediation through the pan-Indian, upper-caste language
of Sanskrit. Often individual motifs in the lives ofbhaktipoet-saints also bear
strong family resemblances. Because vernacularbhaktiverse first appeared in
Tamil, in sixth-century South India,bhaktiis sometimes hypostasized as a muse or
goddess who spent her youth there, aging and revivifying as she moved northward
into other regions and languages. With its central affirmation of religious enthusi-
asm as being more fundamental than rigidities of practice or doctrine,bhaktipro-
vides a common challenge to other aspects of Hindu life. At the same time it con-
tributes to a common Hindu heritage—sometimes also a common heritage of
protest. Yet certain expressions ofbhaktiare far more confrontational than others
in their criticism of caste, image worship, and the performance of vows, pilgrim-
ages, and acts of self-mortification.
The range ofbhaktiis great, and, as with each of the other strands in the great
Hindu braid, there is contestation along the way. Tulsidas, author of the most