Dear friends and colleagues (with apologies for cross-listing),
We are delighted to share that our edited volume, Sanskrit Hymns Across Traditions: Studying Stotras, was recently published in the Routledge Studies in Asian Religion and Philosophy Book Series.
Most of the contributors are members of the Indology listserv and we have benefited greatly from feedback from many of you over the years, both online and in contexts like the South Asia conferences in Madison. Thank you!
We’ll share the book description and table of contents below. We hope it’s useful in your research and teaching, and please consider asking your libraries to add it to their collections.
Best wishes,
Hamsa Stainton and Anna Lee White
Publication Announcement:
Sanskrit Hymns Across Traditions: Studying Stotras
Edited by Hamsa Stainton & Anna Lee White
Routledge, 2026
284 Pages, 13 B/W Illustrations
ISBN 9781032976709
Description:
Sanskrit hymns of praise (stotra/stuti/stava) have been popular and influential within multiple religious traditions for thousands of years. Sanskrit hymns remain lively, meaningful parts of the religious lives of countless Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains today, and new stotras continue to be composed and recited around the world. The academic study of these hymns has made notable progress in recent decades as scholars have paid increasing attention to such compositions.
This book brings together new scholarship by eleven scholars for the first such volume focused on this major genre of religious literature. Central themes of the volume include the stotra genre itself, the role of such hymns of praise in ritual and performative contexts (including liturgy and preaching), and the public and polemical dimensions of such hymns across traditions. The chapters dwell on theoretical, methodological, and comparative concerns, and they contain original translations of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain stotras.
A valuable pedagogical resource for educators teaching about Asian religions and literature, especially in comparative contexts, this book also establishes the foundation for future research and scholarship on a genre of religious poetry popular across South Asian religious traditions.
Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: Studying Stotras Across Traditions (Hamsa Stainton)
Part One: On the Stotra Genre
2. Navigating an Ocean of Hymns: Popular Anthologies and the Study of Sanskrit Stotras (Hamsa Stainton)
3. An Epistemology of Stotra: Hemacandra’s Understanding of the Hymnic Genre through His Mahādeva Stotra (Lynna R. Dhanani)
4. Praise-Poems in Kṛṣṇa Temples and Royal Courts: Virudāvalī as Stotra and Praśasti (David Buchta)
Part Two: Recitation, Liturgy, and Preaching
5. The Jain Hymn of Undying Devotion: An Annotated Translation of the Bhaktāmara Stotra of Mānatuṅga (Steven M. Vose)
6. History, Supernormal Powers, and Liturgy: Jain Sets of Stotras (John E. Cort)
7. Praise You as I Should: Stotras and the Dharma-Preacher (Dharmabhāṇaka) in Mahāyāna Buddhist Sūtras (Ralph H. Craig III)
8. Stotra as Mantra and Materiality: The Case of Budha-Kauśika’s Rāmarakṣāstotra (Gudrun Bühnemann)
Part Three: Polemics and Publics: Stotras Between and Across Traditions
9. Receptiveness, Assertion, and Subversion in Sectarian Spaces: Appayya Dīkṣita, Madhusūdana Sarasvatī, and Engagement Across Traditions (Matthew Leveille)
10. When Haradatta Met Kūreśa: Printed Stotras and the Public Memory of Sectarian Figures in India between the Seventeenth and Twentieth Centuries (Vishal Sharma)
11. Colonial-Era Engagements with the Stotra Genre: Bhāratendu Hariścandra’s Sītāvallabhastotra (Anna Lee White)
Epilogue
12. Stotra Musings: Shared and Contested Spaces of the Praise Poem Across Traditions (Steven P. Hopkins)
Editors:
Hamsa Stainton is an Associate Professor in the School of Religious Studies at McGill University (Montréal, Canada). He is the author of Poetry as Prayer in the Sanskrit Hymns of Kashmir (2019) and co-editor (with Bettina Sharada Bäumer) of Tantrapuṣpāñjali: Tantric Traditions and Philosophy of Kashmir; Studies in Memory of Pandit H.N. Chakravarty.
Anna Lee White is a Lecturer in the Humanities Department of Marianopolis College (Montréal, Canada). Her research interests include Hindu devotional literature, hagiographies, and gender studies.