Historical Development of the Bhakti Movement in Medieval Hinduism

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This research project aims at the rethinking of the bhakti movement of medieval India from wider and multifarious aspects in the religious history of South Asia. Linguistically, the bhakti literature of medieval Hinduism covered various languages and vernaculars all over India, namely from Indo-Aryans of the North and Dravidians of the South. Therefore, the research team was organized for this particular research topic from different linguistic backgrounds.; namely Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and Bengali. In this respect, this research has its own uniqueness because this kind of comprehensive perspective to shed light to the overall aspects of medieval Hinduism, that of bhakti in particular has so far never been done by the Japanese scholarship.We held in all five workshops during the research period under the name of "Bhakti Workshop" under the leadership of Prof. Iwao Shima, who led this project for the first two years but demised suddenly at the beginning of the academic year of 2007. Prof Yamashita of Tohoku University succeeded his project in the final year.In the academic year 200, apart from holding the final workshop at Tokyo in July, we mainly concentrated upon editing the final report of the project which consists of English monographs of the members. This will be the fruit of the intensive research work of individual researchers under this common topic, being filled with new perspectives and findings.This collection of English articles are to be published from India by JASAS (The Japanese Association of South Asian Studies) as one of the volumes of their Monograph Series, after further refinement and modifications.