About the book

Who is formless and eternal, the question often asked is: why does the Sanatani imagine or believe in his ‘form’? On the other hand, who is formless, why do many find for Him the need of a holy book, a place of worship, a picture of divinity, prayers and readings in special languages? What is the meaning of all this? All these are undeniably different kinds of form, whether one agrees or not. Moreover, the material world is by nature a form, replete with forms.
Without the experience and enlightened vision of the self, there is no truly detached attitude. To speak, or to read, the detachment is only available in bookish philosophies and in the complex nets of logic. The Sanatani believes in the fact that by means of form, the worship of the formless one is possible, and the experiential darshan of the unlimited one is possible too. The Sanatani’s belief in form is based on this experience that having the body is a priority for reaching out to God. Which God to meet, in what an unapproachable heaven, and that only after death, is basically not a Sanatani belief.
And there is more mystery in what is called seeing; seeing is a vibration (from one vibration begin many movements, which constitute the diverse world): from vibration emanates the material form, which is the principal mantra to create form. Some such innate ideas are found to have inspired this Bhajan collection, Bhakti Darshanika here.

About the Author

Prof. Sarangdhar Baral (Saranga) has been working as a professor in the English Department. He pursues PG teaching and advanced research at Mizoram University, a central University in Aizawl (Mizoram). He is currently the Dean of the University’s School of Education and Humanities and also a member of the Executive Council.
Among other works, two of his translations (Odia to English) have been published so far. They were: (1) Kishore Chandrananda Champu of the celebrated poet Kavisurya Bhoveb Rath, Vidyapuri, Cuttack (2012), and (2) the Jagannath Heritage, a collection of hymns by more than eighty devotees and bhakti poets of Sri Jagannath and in Odisha, published by Authors Press, Delhi (2018).
During the lifelong preoccupation with English literature, his first creative composition in Odia was Bhakti Sangitika (2022) and his second Odia devotional composition is this Bhakti Darshanika (2022).