A Translation and Commentary by Edward C. Dimock, Jr.
with an Introduction by Edward C. Dimock, Jr. and Tony K. Stewart.
 

The Caitanya Caritamrta is an early seventeenth-century Bengali and Sanskrit biography of the great saint and Vaisnava leader Caitanya (1486-1533 c.e.), by the poet and scholar Krsnadasa, who has been given by Bengali tradition the title Kaviraja 'Prince of Poets.'

The text is of interest to theologians (Caitanya was, in Krsnadasa's view, an androgyne of Krsna and Radha), philosophers (his theory was that aesthetic and religious experience are much the same in kind), historians of religion (the movement that Caitanya inspired has encompassed the great part of the eastern Indian subcontinent, and Krsnadasa has some interesting observations on his own times), and appreciators of literature (in Krsnadasa's very long poem are embedded some lyric gems).
 
 

The late Edward C. Dimock, Distinguished Service Professor emeritus of the University of Chicago, who has been involved since his Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard in
1959 with the study of the Vaisnavas of Bengal, has translated the book and written a substantial portion of the commentary. He and Tony K. Stewart have
jointly written the Introduction and the notes, as well as other apparatus.

Stewart, who has edited the whole, is Associate Professor of South Asian
Religions at the North Carolina State University; his dissertation (with Dimock at Chicago) and subsequent work have focused on the hagiographies of
Caitanya and on the interaction of the Vaisnavas with other religious traditions of the region. He is founder of the Triangle South Asia Consortium
and currently serves as the director of the North Carolina Center for South  Asia Studies.

Harvard Oriental Series
September 1999   7 x 10   1200 pp.

ISBN 0-674-00285-7   (DIMCAI)
Cloth   $80.00x (L 49.95 UK)