"The verses of the great religious poets of north India stand at the fount of the Hindi language, and many would say that they also represent its greatest flowering. These poems are awash in universal themes--cruelty, loneliness, hope, infatuation, the weight of time--and are well known tobIndians in every walk of life today. Their authors are revered not only as poets but as saints through a hagiographical literature that extends to comic books,...