Concerned with the process in Hinduism of reinterpreting classical texts and imbuing them with new inspiration. An example par excellence is Hariram Vyas's Ras-pancadhyayi, the earliest known Braj Bhasa version of the five chapters of Bhagavatapurana on Krsna's Dance with the Gopis.

This study examines the process in Hinduism of reinterpreting classical texts and imbuing them with new inspiration. An example is Hariram Vras's "Ras-pancadhyayi", the earliest known Braj Bhasa version of the five chapters of "Bhagavatapurana" on Krsna's Dance with the Gopis. Hariram Vyas, a non-sectarian North Indian Krsna devotee (bkakta), lived around the middle of the 16th centiry in Vrindavan in the Braj area, the newly "discovered" centre of Krsna devotion. Vyas composed many devotional songs in praise of the love of Radha and Krsna but his "Ras-pancadhyayi" is the only longer work (it consists of 30 couplets) and the only one formally based on "Bhagavatapurana". This study consists of an English translation and scholarly edition which takes into account manuscript material. On the basis of the studies text, a comparison with the source text in "Bhagavatapurana" is undertaken. References are also made to the Sanskrit commentary of the theologian Vallabha and to another, slightly later Braj Bhasa recreation by the poet Nanddas. In contrast to the latter, Vyas takes more liberties in creating "Bhagavatapurana" which results in a different portrayal of the Gopis and Krsna, and,

The 'Indian Mona Lisa' is an eighteenth-century portrait of the goddess Radha from the Kishangarh school of Rajput Painting. It was purportedly modelled after a young enslaved woman and court-performer, Banī-ṭhanī, who became a concubine of the patron of the painting, crown-prince Savant Singh. Tracing her career, Heidi Pauwels recovers her role as a composer of devotional songs in multiple registers of Classical Hindi and shows how she was a conduit for trend-setting styles from Delhi, including the new vogue of Urdu. Through a combination of literary, historical, and art-historical analysis, she brings to life the vibrant cultural production center of Kishangarh in the eighteenth century by reconstructing how Banī-ṭhanī came to be acclaimed as the devotional poetess Rasikbih�rī and as 'India's Mona Lisa'. This major new study conveys important new insights in the history of Hindi literature and devotion, the family, palace women and the social mobility of the enslaved.