Roads of Bhakti Poetry

Speaker: Dr Andrew Schelling, Jack Kerouac School, Naropa University, Boulder, Colorado

Chair: Ms Vidya Rao, scholar and singer

A translator from Sanskrit, Pali and Hindi, and author of six volumes of poetry indebted to studies in ecology and ethnopoetics, the speaker has edited The Oxford Anthology of Bhakti Literature (New Delhi, 2011), and describes how Bhakti is "˜salted' with an intensity that requires intellectual effort and much honest probing to get close to, how efforts to break free of social constraint took hundreds of forms across India, and the resonances of this literature for audiences far removed in time and place.