Devotional Visualities

This book is the first to focus on material visualities of bhaktiimagery 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.

This volume's 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. The diverse devotional visualities analyzed in this volume meaningfully circulate bhaktiimages in past and present, generating their renewed relationship to contemporary concerns.