Description: Myths, Saints and Legends offers a representative selection of Charlotte Vaudeville's path-breaking studies on north Indian devotional traditions of the medieval period. It brings together, for the first time, some of Vaudeville's scattered essays which fall naturally into two groups - one dealing with the cluster of myths surrounding the cult of Krishna in the Braj region and the other with Vithoba, in the Pandharpur region in Maharashtra. A third section consists of two pieces on the popular romantic legends of the pastoral Ahirs and Jats. Vaudeville's knowledge of the Bengali Chaitanya tradition at one end and the Marathi at the other makes for a narrative of all-India significance, which can trace affinities between regional traditions as well as distinguish the peculiarities. Above all there is an awareness, which is characteristic of her later work, of the historical evolution of a strand of tradition, of accretions and layerings which never completely replaced the older strata but continued to coexist. The essays in this collection offer a fine representation of an approach which integrates a vast range of material and disciplines: epigraphic, iconographic, and textual. Vaudeville draws upon a wide variety of sources: the Sanskrit epics, the Puranas and Kavya literature, as also diverse vernacular textual traditions, including devotional poetry, hagiographies, religious tracts and popular secular forms such as the barahmasa and romantic ballads. These are complemented with material from local oral traditions and personal observation of festivals and rituals, which in their turn supplement and echo, but also correct, the textual and iconographic information.

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