Dictionary of Bhakti: North-Indian Bhakti Texts into Khari Boli Hindi and English.

• Author: Pauwels, Heidi
• Position: Book review

Dictionary of Bhakti: North-Indian Bhakti Texts into Khari Boli Hindi and English. By WINAND CALLEWAERT, with the assistance of SWAPNA SHARMA. New Delhi: D. K. PRINTWORLD, 2009. 3 vols. Pp. 2187.

Those interested in the devotional literature of North India, known as bhakti, have had the use of a wonderful tool for translation since 1993: the Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary by R. S. McGregor. While this is usually seen as a superb dictionary of modern Hindi with reliable etymologies, it contains as a bonus a significant amount of lexical items from the older registers of the language, making it the first choice for English-speaking scholars, before turning to the more specialized Old Hindi-Modern Hindi dictionaries. Now, sixteen years later, those scholars have another very welcome dictionary, this one exclusively devoted to Old Hindi (with translations in both Modern Hindi and English): the work under review.

This three-volume dictionary of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century bhakti texts is the magnum opus of Dr. Winand Callewaert (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium). It is the crown on years of hard work in the field of early bhakti literature. Callewaert has long been indefatigably collating manuscripts of early North Indian bhakti texts, editing them so as to establish texts as close to the period of origin as possible, and providing translations to make them available to a larger audience. Callewaert has thus over the course of his productive career compiled a large database and developed computer programs to sort and alphabetically organize the words of these texts. He rightly realized that with such a large data-base at his disposal he was in an excellent position to compile a dictionary. Notwithstanding the warning of his guru, Father Camille Bulcke of English-Hindi Dictionary (1968) fame, he courageously took on the task. Thus came about the work under review, which is really a corpus-based dictionary but on a much larger scale than, for instance, Christopher Shackle's model A Guru Minak Glossary (Vancouver: Univ. of British Columbia Press and London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1981). The ambitious scale of Callewaert's dictionary is a great virtue, but it also brings a host of problems with it.

While Callewaert has mainly worked on so-called nirguna bhakti (devotion centered on a God without attributes), in particular the DAthipanthi and Sikh traditions, he has always been keen on situating his work within the wider bhakti tradition of North India. He is indeed the "father" of the regularly occurring European "Bhakti Conferences" (first convened by him in Leuven in 1979), in which specialists from all over the world gather to discuss commonalities in their research on early New Indo-Aryan literature of whatever stripe, nirguna, saguna (devotion to God with attributes), Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Jain, or indeed non-religious. For his dictionary Callewaert sought input from colleagues in other bhakti fields, including the saguna tradition (Krishna and Rama poetry). He added their texts to his database and ran them through his computer programs to compile a very large corpus of data. For the processing of these raw materials into a dictionary, he teamed up with Dr. Swapna Sharma (now at Yale), herself born and raised in Vrindaban and a specialist in the Krishna bhakti tradition. The processing of the data took this team about thirteen years.

The result of this herculean (or more appropriately Hanuman-like) effort is a must for any serious translator of any of the manifold bhakti works of North India. In that respect the title of the book, "Dictionary of Bhakti," is apt and addresses a real audience. Lexicographers will immediately object that "Bhakti" is not a language, but a case could be made that the title is...