Organizational and Institutional Aspects of Indian Religious Movements

The editor, Joseph T. O'Connell, is Professor Emeritus in the Study of Religion at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto (Canada). Since his Ph.D. studies on 'Social Implications of the Gaudiya Vaisnava Movement', at Harvard University (U.S.A.) and Government Sanskrit College (Calcutta), he has researched, taught and published exten-sively on religion and society in India and Bangladesh, especially on Vaisnavas and Muslims in Bengal. He has edited or co-edited several volumes: on Bengali studies, Gaudiya Vaisnavas, Sikh history and religion, Rabindranath Tagore, Bengalis in Canada. In 1990 he lectured at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study on 'Biographies of Chaitanya as Sources for Historical, Sociological and Psychological Study of Religion'. While as a Fellow of the IIAS Project on 'Socio-Religious Movements and Cultural Networks in Indian Civilization', he published Religious Movements and Social Structure: The Case of Chaitanya's Vaisnavas of Bengal.