Includes bibliographical references (pages 259-281) and index.

"Within the broad Hindu religious tradition, there have been for millennia many subtraditions generically called Vaiṣṇava, who insist that the most appropriate mode of religious faith and experienceis bhakti, or devotion, to the supreme personal deity, Viṣṇu. Caitanya Vaiṣṇavas, a community of Vaiṣṇava devotees who coalesced around Kṛṣṇa Caitanya (1486-1533), who taught devotion to the name and form of Kṛṣṇa, especially in conjunction with his divine consort Rādhā and who also came to be looked upon by many as Kṛṣṇa himself who had graciously chosen to be born in Bengal to exemplify the ideal mode of loving devotion (prema-bhakti). This book focusses on the relationship between the 'transcendent' intentionality of religious faith of human beings and their 'mundane' socio-cultural ways of living, through a detailed study of the social implications of the Caitanya Vaiṣṇava devotional Hindu tradition in pre-colonial and colonial Bengal. Structured in two parts, the first analyses the articulation of Kṛṣṇa-bhakti within the broad Hindu sector of Bengali society. The second section examines Hindu-Muslim relationships in Bengal from the particular vantage point of the Caitanya Vaiṣṇava tradition, and in which the subtle influence of Kṛṣṇa-bhakti, it is argued, may be detected. In both sections, the bulk of attention is given to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Bengal was under independent Sultanate or emergent Mughal rule and thus free of the impact of British and European colonial influence"--