Author and Authority in the Bhakti Poetry of North India

In america we love to put our names on things. Everything from tree trunks to subway cars bears the evidence of our desire to announce what we are and own, and in the world of arts and letters the landscape is little changed. There the copyright expresses our instinct that even creativity has its property aspect: we claim what we have composed. There is a great tendency among us to be suspicious of anything unsigned, and pseudonymity is rare.