Merchants, Saints and Mahatma

Modern Gujarati religious culture bears the stamp of two nineteenth and twentieth century movements with global reach. The Swaminarayan tradition, founded in Gujarat in the early nineteenth century, holds its core texts in Gujarati, the Shikshapatri's precepts and the Vachanamrut's recorded discourses of its founder, and its temple building diaspora has carried Gujarati liturgy, scripture reading and hymnody to East Africa, Britain and North America, where some of the largest Hindu temples outside India conduct their devotional life substantially in Gujarati.

The second figure is Mohandas Gandhi, who wrote his autobiography and much of his religious and moral prose in Gujarati, translated the Bhagavad Gita into Gujarati as the Anasakti Yoga, and built his ashram prayer meetings around a Gujarati devotional core in which Narsinh Mehta's Vaishnava Jana To held the central place, so that a fifteenth century Gujarati hymn became the ethical signature of a worldwide political movement. The trading diaspora that carried Gujarati around the Indian Ocean also carried its religious institutions, Hindu temples, Jain derasars and Ismaili jamatkhanas, the last preserving devotional literature in Gujarati among the Khoja community. Few regional languages of India support so wide a devotional geography.