Gujarat's devotional literature is in Gujarati rather than in Sanskrit, and that choice is the point. Narasinha Mehta, working in the fifteenth century, composed songs to Krishna that entered ordinary household singing rather than temple liturgy, and the stories told about him turn on his rejection of caste restriction: the best known has him singing in the quarter of an untouchable community and being expelled by his own. One of his hymns, on what makes a person genuinely good, was among Gandhi's favourites and is sung at public occasions in India to this day.
Neelima Shukla-Bhatt's study of that material makes a point that applies well beyond Gujarat. The songs and the stories about the singer travel together and shape one another, so the figure of the poet saint is not a biography that later acquired legends but a single tradition in which the life and the verses do the same work.
The other Gujarati religious fact of global consequence is emigration. Gujarati merchant, artisan and farming communities settled in East Africa, and after the expulsions of the 1970s many moved on to Britain, North America and elsewhere. They carried Jain, Swaminarayan and Pushtimarg institutions with them, and the very large temple complexes built by the Swaminarayan movement in London, Chicago and Abu Dhabi are the visible result. Gujarati religion is therefore documented as fully in the diaspora as it is at home.