# Merchant Networks and Sensibilities in the Caurāsī Vaiṣṇavan Kī Vārtā **Presenter**: [[Tyler W. Williams]] **Session**: [[Session 1. Networks & Canonisation]] **Abstract**: The Caurāsī Vaiṣṇavan Kī Vārtā or Tales of the 84 Vaishnavas, an early seventeenth-century hagiographical compendium recording the lives of Vallabhacharya's early disciples, maps the early growth of the Pushtimarg community through human networks. The backbone of this network consisted of merchants, and the stories of their lives contained in the Caurāsī Vaiṣṇavan Kī Vārtā encode the same mercantile sensibilities that drove the growth of the community in its early years. These didactic stories also demonstrate how certain mercantile inclinations had to be disciplined or redirected in order to serve the needs of the religious community. This paper will do two things: first, it will present a network map of the early Pushtimarg community, demonstrating how the community grew and spread through mercantile networks and connections. This network can be mapped both geographically and prosopographically. Second, it will identify recurrent tropes and motifs that appear in the stories of individual merchant disciples in order to reconstruct a mercantile logic that structured bhakti and sevā: an ‘economy’ of devotion, images, and icons (to borrow a term from Marie-José Mondzain study of Byzantine Christianity).