The Dictionary of Bhakti

Swapna Sharma

Yale University

“The dictionary of Bhakti: North-Indian Bhakti Text into Khari Boli Hindi and English” was published in three volumes in 2009. It was designed to assist translators and editors by supplying contextual meaning. For example, worldly metaphors, expressions from daily life, connotations derived from specialized knowledge of Hath Yoga. This dictionary is a representative selection of 16th and 17th centuries Nirgun and Sagun texts of North India. As we know, the bhakti literature of early and late medieval period was mostly written in the vernacular languages, the principle of which were Brajbhasha and Avadhi. In spite of being so popular, the challenge of research has been that this literature is primarily accessible in manuscripts form and very little has been critically edited. I dedicated more than a decade to the dictionary of Bhakti. My main job was to provide contextual meaning to words. In this paper I share my experience of being part of this lengthy process of compiling a dictionary.

Bio: Swapna Sharma is a Senior Hindi Lector at Yale University.  Before joining Yale in 2009 she was a Lecturer in Hindi at University of Chicago. Swapna started her career as Hindi lecturer at University of Leipzig in 2007. She had been engaged with dictionary project for several years at Katholieke University, Belgium. Swapna Sharma received Ph.D. for her pioneer work on early Hindi devotional poet ‘Gadadhar Bhatt’ from Agra University. Her research concerns Hindi language and literature with focus on Braj Bhasha, its role in temple rituals and performing arts, hagiography and lexicography of the devotional literature of the middle Indo- Aryan languages, twentieth century Hindi poetry and gender.