Christian Lee Novetzke's Religion and Public Memory is an artful and erudite study of the thirteenth-century Marathi-speaking saint Namdev. It maps, for the first time, the presence of Namdev across a range of cultural archives, from medieval hagiographic texts to contemporary Marathi cinema. Novetzke's seamless movement through these materials enables a reading of bhakti in the public sphere that foregrounds anamnesis and innovation. Indeed, a central concern of the book is to move beyond static notions of authorship and deal with the paradoxes of cultural memory. Novetkze notes that “public memory often functions at the expense of historical accuracy, even while both desires are at work in the long tradition that surrounds Namdev in Maharashtra” (p. 250). This project taps into the complex textual, archival, and oral reservoirs that constitute “public memory” about Namdev and illustrates the multiple cultural and social mobilizations of the figure of the saint in Maharashtra and beyond. At the heart of the book is an analysis of Namdev, who stands, in the words of Pierre Nora, “between memory and history,” as a malleable, dynamic social and cultural presence that is abstract yet historical.

Part I of the book is entitled “Practices of Memory” and consists of three chapters that stand at the interstices of history and historiography, writing, and performance. In his discussion of kirtan performance traditions, Novetzke demonstrates very convincingly how representations of Namdev in performance are “adaptive historiographic strategies” (p. 192). As Novetzke shows later in the book, ever-shifting kirtan representations position Namdev as a protonationalist hero in public memory. He is eventually understood as a champion of rashtriya humanism in images, texts, and performances that resonate far beyond the local traditions of Varkari and Naradiya kirtan.

In chapter 3, Novetzke posits that hagiographic sources such as Mahipati's eighteenth-century Bhaktavijay elude the standard dialectics around “orality” and “literacy.” Novetzke instead sees a tension between “performance” and “permanence” in Namdev traditions. He understands the Bhaktavijay as oscillating between these registers, “a kind of written kirtan, a textual commentary that emerges from the performance tradition” (p. 121). This chapter also unearths some key evidence in the form of bada (notebook) manuscripts that are effectively records of kirtan performance from the eighteenth century. As material artifacts, the badas point to the cultural primacy attributed to “performance,” but the mnemonic and social need for “permanence.”

Part II of the book, “Publics of Memory,” opens with a highly nuanced discussion of the problems of authorship. Here, Novetzke develops two important theoretical formulations, those of “corporate authorship” and “anamnetic authorship.” By corporate authorship, Novetzke refers to the ways in which “multiple authors participate in investing a performance piece with a unique genealogy of authorship, and how this is done in an embodied, ‘corporate,’ way” (pp. 152–53). Anamnetic authorship operates along the principles of mimesis and replication. For example, the identities of multiple historical “Namdev” figures are collapsed in the memory systems of performance. Novetzke argues that the full import of the public memory of Namdev is actualized in performance, when corporate and anamnetic authorship operate simultaneously. Chapter 5, perhaps one of the most interesting sections of the book, focuses on the sometimes apocryphal narratives that situate Namdev as a social bandit and murderer. Novetzke illuminates how these narratives were consumed and reified by subaltern publics in eighteenth-century Maharashtra. The final two chapters consider the ways in which Namdev is remembered and refashioned as an iconic symbol for the nation. Chapter 6 delineates the unique “cosmopolitan . . . historiographic vocabulary” (p. 214) of religious nationalism that plays a central role in the emergence of a new civic religion based on what Novetzke identifies as an “ethics of humanism” (p. 209). In the final chapter, Novetzke offers an analysis of two Marathi films, both entitled Sant Namdev (1949 and 1991), and highlights the deployment of the figure of Namdev at two very different sociohistorical conjectures in India—those of independence in the 1940s and the emergent neoliberal expansions of the 1980s. In both cases, Novetzke emphasizes that films “are preeminent sites of public memory” (p. 218) and that the social place afforded to Namdev through cinematic reinventions of his life is a response to anxieties about caste, nation, and modernity.

Religion and Public Memory is by far one of the most provocative and insightful recent works on religion in South Asia. The bewildering range of Novetzke's sources, combined with the high levels of theoretical sophistication that he brings to the idea of “public memory,” make this an incredibly substantive contribution. It is bound to become a classic in the field.