Hagiography and Community Formation: The Case of a Lost Community of Sixteenth-Century Vrindavan

This paper studies the link between hagiography and religious community formation, analysing how sectarian communities are 'imagined' in hagiography. The immediate purpose of this article is to look at hagiographies about the sixteenth-century Hariram Vyas to investigate why no sect formed around him, but how he instead came to be claimed by different sectarian groups. The more general relevance of this article lies in its methodology of how to read hagiographies as a literature subject to issues of genre, form and redaction criticism, and intertextuality, and in tracing how religious communities can be constructed and how they fail.