Chapter 1: Studying the Sultanate Period
Chapter 2: Inaugurating Hindavi
Chapter 3: Creating a New Genre: The Candayan
Chapter 4: Oceans and Stories: The Mirigivati
Chapter 5: The Landscape of Paradise and the Embodied City: The
Padmavat, Part 1
Chapter 6: The Conquest of Chittaur: The Padmavat, Part 2
Chapter 7: Bodies That Signify: The Madhumalati, Part 1
Chapter 8: The Seasons of Madhumalati's Separation: The
Madhumalati, Part 2
Chapter 9: Hierarchies of Response
Epilogue: The Story of Stories
Notes
Index
Aditya Behl (1966-2009) was Associate Professor of South Asian
Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Wendy Doniger is Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of
the History of Religions at the University of Chicago.
"With its subtle readings, its steadfast rigor in
contextualization, and its thorough dismissal of the sectarian
binaries within which such texts have been traditionally read, the
book is an illuminating, cosmopolitan, and continually insightful
read and a wonderful testament to Behl's lasting place in South
Asian scholarship."--Samira Sheikh, Journal of the American
Oriental Society
"The monograph illuminates the genre of Hindavi Sufi romance, and
subtly deploys this genre's emphasis on the magic of love to
counter modern Hindu and Muslim nationalist sentiments. Behl
furnishes us with an extraordinary account of this genre's
structure, themes, and functions."--Reading Religion
"In Love's Subtle Magic, a remarkable and highly original book,
Aditya Behl uses a little-understood genre of Sufi literature to
paint an entirely new picture of the evolution of Indian culture
during the earliest period of Muslim domination...Behl's analysis
brilliantly illuminates the cosmopolitan and composite culture of
the Sultanate India in which they were composed. This in turn
compels us completely to rethink the standard of the opposition
between Indian Hindu and foreign Muslim and recognize that the
Indo-Islamic culture of this era was already significantly Indian
in many important ways."--Reading Religion
"Doniger has edited an excellent volume constructed from lectures
and drafts written by the late Behl...This volume is an
indispensable guide to a long-ignored literary genre that provides
glimpses into a society in which Hindus and Muslims, kings and
commoners, composed a social order now divided into two hostile
communities...Highly recommended." --CHOICE
"Aditya Behl's magnum opus is the consummation of his long quest
for the multiple meanings of four fourteenth- to sixteenth-century
epic romances, Indic and Hindu in language and imagery, yet written
by Muslim poets attached to Sufi orders. His magisterial and lucid
analysis, graced by lovely translations and suffused by his passion
for storytelling, transcends the communalized assumptions of much
modern scholarship on these enigmatic poems, to
persuasively reconstruct their contemporary contexts of religious,
political, and gender ideologies and of courtly and esoteric
performance."--Philip Lutgendorf, author of Hanuman's Tale: The
Messages of a Divine
Monkey
"In this multi-faceted work Aditya Behl shows persuasively that the
Avadhi Sufi romances not only belong to a 'regional or Hindustani
literary tradition with its own poets and politics,' but also move
within a 'larger Islamicate world in which stories, people, and
merchandise travelled freely.' Thus the 'yogic garb of the Sufi
seeker and his sensuous meeting with the divinely beautiful
beloved' must be read within a Sufistically inflected 'generic
logic.' Behl
does an elegant job of elucidating the allegorical complexities of
this logic; it is sad to realize that we will have no more such
work from him."--Frances W. Pritchett, Professor of Modern
Indic
Languages, Columbia University
"If India is an ocean of stories, its deepest currents are
mysticism, its highest waves poetry. Only the most masterful of
fishermen could test these waters with hope of success. Aditya Behl
has done the nearly miraculous: he has given us all the catch from
his wondrous, too brief, time as the supreme troller and the
compleat angler of pre-modern Indian Sufi romances. Wendy Doniger
has paid a tribute to his genius, putting it on display as if by an
act of
legerdemain in editing this long but never disappointing treasure
trove of Hindustan."--Bruce Lawrence, Nancy and Jeffrey Marcus
Humanities Professor of Religion, Duke University
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