Prof. Rebecca Manring’s adventures in India began with no visible trajectory. Her fascination with the country led her to seek out language instruction, and she found a Bengali teacher in her home town of Seattle. After working privately with her for a year, she began to study Sanskrit as one of the perks of employment at the University of Washington. She was quickly “hooked” and gained formal admission to the graduate program in Asian Languages and Literatures in 1985. Eventually, she realized that she could earn a living working with the languages, and the culture, she had come to love. In 1996, she joined the faculty of Indiana University as the first hire, after the founding director, in its new India Studies program, where she initially taught Sanskrit and Hindi, and soon added courses in literature, cinema, and religious studies. Prof. Manring’s position converted to tenure track in 2000. She was awarded tenure in 2007 and promoted to Full Professor in 2018. Her research on hagiographical literature in premodern Bengal resulted in the publication of two books. The research for those books was largely based on unpublished manuscripts, and the search for those manuscripts led her to many unforeseen places. Most notable was the private collection of the late noted linguist Sukumar Sen. His son Subhadra Kumar Sen allowed her access to those manuscripts, and eventually, granted Prof. Manring permission to microfilm them, as they both recognized their precarious condition. As they were cleaning and cataloguing those manuscripts, they found a complete manuscript of Rūparāma Cakravartī’s Dharma-maṇgala, and made plans to complete his father’s work of critically editing the text, and then producing an English translation. The second Prof. Sen died before they could make much of a start on that project, and so in his memory and homage she has completed the translation. Now, she wants to see what the text means to the people for whom it is important, and so she is embarking upon the final phase of the work with this text, namely, this ethnographic work.
Prof. Manring’s Fulbright-Nehru project proposes to continue the exploration of the contemporary ritual applications of Rūparāma Cakravartī’s mid-17th century Dharma-maṅgala, coupled with her translation and analysis of the text, will contribute to their understanding first of the breadth of pre-modern theological anthropology of Bengal, by which she means how people lived out their rituals and devotion to their chosen deities; and second, of how those practices extend into the 21st century.
Bengali maṅgala-kāvya have much to say about non-brahminical religious praxis and illuminate our understanding of daily rural life in the pre-colonial era, providing a means for expressing non-brahmanical views and values. Moreover, the performative nature of ritual life allowed and continues to allow lower groups in the normative hierarchy a place of power and importance.