Narasinha Mehta of Gujarat: A Legacy of Bhakti in Songs and Stories

Neelima Shukla-Bhatt's Narasinha Mehta of Gujarat, A Legacy of Bhakti in Songs and Stories, published by Oxford University Press in 2015, is a scholarly study of the fifteenth century Gujarati poet-saint Narasinha Mehta, examining both the devotional songs attributed to him and the hagiographic stories that grew up around his life within the wider bhakti devotional tradition. Shukla-Bhatt is a specialist in Gujarati literature and bhakti poetry. Its strength is that it treats both the poetry and its later hagiographic reception together, a combination specific studies of either alone often miss, and it is a peer reviewed university press monograph. Its limit is that, as with any bhakti poet-saint tradition, the received biographical material is itself largely hagiographic rather than documentary, a limit Shukla-Bhatt herself addresses directly rather than one hidden by the study.