Sisir’s Tears: Bhakti and Belonging in Colonial Bengal Varuni Bhatia Published online: 29 March 2017 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017 Abstract This article explores the manner in which bhakti emerges as a politi- cotheological concept in the period of rising nationalism in colonial Bengal. It examines Śrī Amiya Nimāī Carita, a multivolume sacred biography of Kr ˙ s ˙ n ˙ a-Cai- tanya (1486–1533) authored by Sisir Kumar Ghosh (1840–1911) between 1885 and 1910. Ghosh was a journalist and a publisher with a reputation for anticolonialism and Hindu revivalism. Ghosh’s autobiographical and didactic prefaces attached to this sacred biography allow us to parse out a complex narrative of filial bonds and belonging that is integrally connected to an ambrosial (amiya) Nima ¯ı ¯ (Caitanya’s nickname) and the devotional collective dedicated to him. Furthermore, these sacred biographies draw correspondences between the figure of Nima ¯ı ¯ himself and the idea of Bengal—its history, culture, people, and society. This article systematically examines the evidence provided in this sacred biography of such overlaps between the figure of Caitanya and love for Bengal to argue that in the years leading up to the Swadeshi movement (1905–8), Vais ˙ n ˙ ava bhakti, with its emphasis on love, loss, and femininity, arises as the idiom of comprehending and reifying ideas of intimacy and belonging to one’s homeland. In this fashion, they intellectually prepare the ground for the emergence of the powerful notion of deś-bhakti in its modern form—as patriotic nationalism based upon love and devotion for homeland. Keywords Bhakti · anticolonial nationalism · Bengal · Vais ˙ n ˙ avism · Caitanya (1486–1533) · Sisir Kumar Ghosh (1840–1911) · Śrī Amiya Nimāī Carita · Swadeshi movement · deś-bhakti In the last decade of the nineteenth century, a multivolume sacred biography of Kr ˙ s ˙ n ˙ a Caitanya (1486–1533), a devotee of Kr ˙ s ˙ n ˙ a, caught the imagination of the & Varuni Bhatia varunib@umich.edu Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA 123 International Journal of Hindu Studies (2017) 21:1–24 DOI 10.1007/s11407-017-9205-1