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Singing as Lyric and Performance: Interpreting Devotion in Two Religions of India

Steven Hopkins's Singing the Body of God and M. Whitney Kelting's Singing to theJinas are exceedingly fine studies. At the most general level, they both contribute to the study of religion in India through the analysis of song. Yet even within this generality, their many differences emerge: Hopkins's study examines the lyrics of hymns in celebration of God within the Tamil Sri Vaisnava tradition in South India; Kelting's examines the performance of songs in celebration of Jinas (who can be thought of as God; Kelting, pp. 2-3, 205, n. 1) of the Gujarat-inspired SvetambarJain tradition in Maharashtra, North India. Moreover, Hopkins's book centers on an historical male authoritative author, Vedantadesika (ca. 1268-1369); Kelting's on a present-day singing collective ofJain laywomen. Hopkins's study is literary and formal in style, employing methods of textual exegesis; Kelting's is sociological and accessible in style, employing ethnographic methods. Some thematic common ground is provided by the authors' characterization of their respective hymns as "devotional." This intriguing category, as I have discussed,1 describes a participatory mode of religiosity, in which the actor (singer, author, etc.) brings seeming oppositions together, such as intellection and emotion, abstraction and detail, the establishment and the vox populi, and so on, in her or his self-expression of commitment to an intensely spiritual way of life. For example, a main theme in Hopkins's study is how the hymns of the towering fourteenth-century author, Vedantadesika, embody "reflexive polarities": "the relationship, for instance, between poetry and philosophy; Tamil and Sanskrit; local and pan-regional; cosmopolitan and vernacular; sacred and secular; intellectual and emotional; divine 'presence' and 'absence'; or this-worldly and heavenly is never simply one of'pure' opposition or univocal relation in Desika" (Hopkins, p. 11). In Kelting's study, a main theme is Jain laywomen's negotiation of devotion and orthodoxy: "The lack of prescriptive advice expressly for women in the lay manual literature permits the laywomen to negotiate this terrain by articulating how they understand their own religious