The Introduction sets the stage for a study of Guru Nanak’s sensuous poetics by introducing his multidimensional persona: poet-songster-jeweller-prophet-pragmatic philosopher. Guru Nanak’s body-sanctifying (somatophilial) poetic textures resonant with love for the all-inclusive One (theophilia), extending to fellow beings (anthropophilia) and the environment (biophilia). They construct a new paradigm that celebrates all physical phenomena, each passing instant, and everybody. These hymns have the potential to make their way beyond Sikh religious discourses and spaces of worship to their public multisensory reception so new imaginaries and wholistic existentialities can be reproduced in today’s hyperpolarized society. The study draws upon the author’s feminist translation impulse, and a wide range of sources from classical rasa theory to various western studies of aesthetics (Mark Johnson, Hélène Cixous, Richard Shusterman, John Dewey, Plato). The overall approach, framework for the book, and its significance are outlined in the Introduction. Also staged is a Nanakian concert (Prelude): inviting world audiences to attend Guru Nanak’s virtuoso performance.

In his well-known autobiographical essay, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” Rorty observed two contrasting dispositions that he developed as a young boy. On the one hand, as the son of two radical, fellow-traveling Trotskyists, he absorbed a firm commitment to social justice and democratic politics. At the same time, as a solitary, even lonely child, living in rural isolation, he also had “private, weird, snobbish, incommunicable interests,” such as an obsession with various species of wild orchids that grew near his home in northwest New Jersey. Much has been written about Rorty’s politics, about his “Trotsky” side. But relatively little has been said about his encounters with wild orchids, “Wordsworthean moments” in which he felt “touched by something numinous, something of ineffable importance.” Rorty said “there is no reason to be ashamed of, or downgrade, or try to slough off, your Wordsworthean moments.” Yet no one said less about these moments than Rorty himself; he seemed to slough them off. Why? My argument is that even acknowledging having had such moments (which he rarely did) seemed to him to pose a threat to his antifoundationalism, to his remarkably extreme view of human autonomy, and to his resolutely anti-authoritarian temperament. Alas.