It’s been a while since I’ve updated this site, but I’ve been making steady progress on my dissertation. I recently completed a draft and plan to spend the next couple months revising it. I also intend to share some more materials here soon, so feel free to subscribe or check back soon.
Last November, at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in San Diego, I presented the following paper. I also presented it on Monday at the South Asia Graduate Student Forum at Columbia University. The paper is entitled “Garlanding Hinduism: Nābhādās’s Bhaktamāl in the Colonial Context.” Here’s a description:
The Bhaktamāl played a key role in the emergence of modern Hinduism. From the time of its composition in the early seventeenth century, Nābhādās’s collection of hagiographies has served as a site for debate and discussion over the boundaries of an inclusive community united through loving devotion. A key moment in the transmission and reception of this text came during the first decade of the twentieth century when two scholars, Sītārāmśaraṇ Bhagavān Prasād ‘Rūpkalā’ and George Abraham Grierson turned their attention to the Bhaktamāl and composed modern commentaries on it. This presentation will consider these commentaries and, in so doing, hopefully shed some light on the emergence of a broadly defined Vaishnava and Hindu community
And here’s a PDF of the paper.
I’ve decided to reorganize Bhaktamal.org as a blog. This change should make it easier to keep up with new content and make it easier for me to make casual additions.I expect to write more here once I actually start writing in earnest, probably in the new year.
This is a preprint of an article submitted for consideration to Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory [2007] [copyright Taylor & Francis]; Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory is available online at: http://journalsonline.tandf.co.uk/
Through the Bhaktamāl and its most influential commentary, therefore, we witness a debate over the boundaries of a religious community. In support of their positions, Nābhādās and Priyādās advance different visions of the logic of devotion and its objects and articulate different understandings of the relationship between historical devotees and a past which transcends historical time. The tension I explore in this essay, between Nābhādās and Priyādās can, in hindsight, be viewed as a debate over the boundaries and composition of what would later come to be called Hinduism. In the colonial context of the nineteenth century, this debate would become more prominent and well defined, but many of the ingredients were already present during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In this essay, I do not have space to trace the Bhaktamāl’s long tradition into the nineteenth century, but this brief analysis of the Bhaktamāl and its earliest known commentary may contribute to a better understanding of the religious subjectivities of the traditionalist advocates of modern Hinduism.
Narendra Jhā’s Bhaktamāl: Paṭhānuśīlan evam Vivecan is a thorough account and critical edition of Nābhādās’s Bhaktamāl. Jhā’s detailed study, published in 1978, still provides the best general overview of the Bhaktamāl, engaging closely with the previous literature and carefully weighing the evidence. In addition to treating basic but nonetheless difficult questions of author and date, Jhā positions the Bhaktamāl within Hindi literature and devotional Hinduism. He surveys this text’s extensive commentarial tradition, and he provides a detailed account of Bhaktamāl manuscripts in India. Jhā’s volume culminates in a critical edition of the Nābhādās’s work that attempts to reconstruct the original form of this important but understudied text.
There have not been many book-length studies of the Bhaktamāl, and none of these are in English. Jhā has provided an important service to all subsequent Bhaktamāl scholars by carefully and definitively considering prior debates about the most fundamental elements of the Bhaktamāl and resolving them as far as the evidence allows.
Jhā, Narendra. Bhaktamāl, Pāthānuśīlana evam Vivecan. Patna: Anupam Prakāśan, 1978.
Cross-posted at 113thstreet.net
Yesterday evening the India International Centre hosted a musical performance of Tukaram’s abhangs followed by a screening of Sant Tukaram, a 1936 Marathi film. In 1937, this film became the first Indian film to win an award at the Venice Film Festival. It is a simple yet powerful depiction of the the life of the early seventeenth-century Marathi poet-saint Tukaram.
Dilip Chitre introduced the film by contextualizing it in terms of the social and political situation of 1930s India. This Tukaram is clearly modeled on Mahatma Gandhi. Tukaram has devoted himself to the praise of Pandurang, his chosen deity, even at the expense of his own well-being and the prosperity of his wife and children. Despite, or because of, his piety and simplicity, Tukaram finds himself beset by enemies. A powerful Brahmin in particular persecutes Tukaram and attempts to take credit for his compositions.
Tukaram does not resist persecution. Instead, he submits to the punishments imposed on him by the mighty. The schemes of the persecutors, however, all fail. The mighty, including the great Marathi leader Shivaji, are eventually conquered by Tukaram’s devotion to God, and Pandurang intervenes to protect his followers from harm. As in Gandhian thought, Truth and piety trump worldly power and deceit.
By modeling this Tukaram so clearly on Gandhi, the historical/literary figure of Tukaram comes to be seen as a precedent for Gandhi. Tukaram’s hagiography becomes indistinguishable from Gandhi’s. Hagiographical tropes are notoriously portable. Encounters with the powerful serve to demonstrate the superiority and humility of the saint and to illustrate the contingent nature of political dominance.
In the waning days of the Raj, such a message would have seemed particularly relevant.
Cross posted from 113th Street.
A basic mistake regarding orientalism is the expectation that orientalists will be consistently haughty and disdainful of the ‘Orient’ they describe. The consistency of orientalism lies in its conviction that ‘Orientals’ are better off being ruled by Europeans. Orientalists portray the ‘East’ as static, tyranical, and obscure, but they oftentimes express this discursively established pattern in apparently objective or even sympathetic terms.
There can be no doubt that F.S. Growse’s Mathurá: A District Memoir is a work of orientalist scholarship. Growse was a colonial administrator, and this volume is a work in service of empire. He can be critical of the actual administration of empire, particularly his own transfer out of Mathurá, but he does not seem to doubt in the slightest that Indians are better off under English tutelage.
That said, Growse is not some comic book imperial villain. He shows great curiosity in the culture he finds himself surrounded by and is generally sympathetic in his portrayal of this culture. At times he seems haughty or dismissive, but he usually takes care to note the beauty and truth of particular Hindu doctrines.
Growse is neither ill-informed about nor disdainful of Indian culture, but his sympathy, intelligence, and curiosity do not prevent him from advocating and personally participating in European domination of distant societies.
Cross posted from 113th Street.
Next month, the Indian government will launch the New Linguistic Survey of India, which seeks to update and expand the work directed a century ago by George Abraham Grierson:
What are the objectives of the [New Linguistic Survey of India]? It will primarily profile the Indian linguistic space by describing each language and speech variety, its structure, socio-cultural role and demographics. The survey will make possible a reasonable lexicon and grammatical sketch for each language. It will also record the interactions between various linguistic communities, which involves tracking bilingualism and multilingualism. There will also be a massive audio-visual documentation of speech varieties. Linguistic maps, charts, graphs and atlases of languages will be created. (Outlook)
Cross posted from 113th Street.
Krishna Sharma’s Bhakti and the Bhakti Movement is an extended critique of academic understandings of bhakti. “Bhakti” in Sanskrit and related languages is a general term for loving devotion, but it has also become a technical term for exclusive monotheistic devotion to a personal God to the exclusion of other paths traditionally available to Hindus, particularly jñāna, or experiential knowledge. Sharma forcefully argues that this technical, academic understanding of bhakti is mistaken. The idea that a devotional monotheism spread throughout India, from South to North, during the medieval period (”the Bhakti Movement”) is a product of Western orientalists, who influenced later Indian scholars.
My adviser Jack Hawley, in a lecture at Columbia University, has observed that these nineteenth-century orientalists never used the phrase “Bhakti Movement.” These scholars may have contributed to a misunderstanding of bhakti, as Sharma argues, but they cannot be credited with inventing the notion of a Bhakti Movement. We need to look elsewhere to trace the origins of this concept.
The narrow understanding of bhakti that Sharma derides can be found in one Hindu sect: the Gauḍiya Vaishnavas. These followers of Kṛṣṇa Caitanya advance precisely this notion of Bhakti. H.H. Wilson, in an offhand remark, referred to this form of bhakti as prevalent in Bengal. Wilson’s accurate enough comment got picked up by subsequent orientalists, Western then Indian, who mistakenly applied the part to the whole.
Sharma’s main argument for the inapplicability of this notion of bhakti more generally is the existence of nirguṇa bhakti–devotion to the qualityless absolute. These bhakts deny the existence of a personal God in favor of dedication to a formless and indescribable absolute. If such a position could be described as bhakti then the prevailing academic notion, described above, is untenable.
In a review of this book, David Lorenzen acknowledges Sharma’s important contribution to the academic discussion of bhakti but identifies several major flaws. He asserts that Sharma advances a “devotionally and nationalistically tinged version of Advaita Vedānta associated with such modern intellectuals as Swami Vivekananda and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan.” He argues that Sharma sometimes redefines terms to suit her own purpose, and he observes that Sharma has failed to cite recent scholarship on bhakti that moves “beyond the older bhakti-religion paradigm she justly criticizes.”
Sharma cites the Bhaktamāl of Nābhādās as evidence that at the time of its composition, bhakti was only understood generically. This text, she correctly observes, refers to a number of bhakts who cannot be readily incorporated into the narrow concept of bhakti that she criticizes. Interestingly enough, the major commentary on the Bhaktamāl, the Bhaktirasabodhinī, was composed by Priyādās, a Gauḍiya Vaishnava. In this commentary, we would then expect to find a specifically Caitanyite concept of bhakti, which would put it in opposition to the text being commented upon.
Many discussions of the Bhaktamāl and the Bhaktirasabodhinī do not adequately distinguish between these works. A careful reading of these two texts in their entirety is necessary to determine exactly what concept of bhakti they are advancing. Does Nābhā-jī only refer to bhakti in a generic sense? Does Priyādās use bhakti in a different and more technical manner? If so, why did Priyādās choose to base his work on one that advanced a perspective diametrically opposed to his own view?
Works Cited
Hawley, John Stratton. “The Bhakti Movement: Says Who? Since When?” Lecture. Columbia University. 21 February 2005.
Lorenzen, David N. Untitled. The Journal of Asian Studies 48:3 (August 1989). 665-6.
Sharma, Krishna. Bhakti and the Bhakti Movement: A New Perspective. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1987.
Cross posted from 113th Street.
The following prospectus was accurate as of August 2006.
Introduction
The Bhaktamāl, Nābhādās’s late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century “garland of devotees,” occupies a central position in the consolidation of modern Hinduism. Nābhādās’s text is one of the first and most influential examples of the bhaktamāl genre, collections of poems that recall and praise great devotees. By praising the qualities of over 900 bhakts, this early modern text sets the boundaries of a devotional community that far exceeds the sectarian context in which Nābhādās wrote. In so doing, it also helps to shape the intertwined trajectories of linguistic and national consolidation. These trajectories became realized in the nineteenth century as modern Hinduism, the Hindi language, and the nationalist movement. An unequal negotiation between British imperialists and their elite colonial subjects certainly helped to solidify these categories, but these streams all flow from the centuries preceding colonial rule. The Bhaktamāl is not a text which remains fixed in time; rather, it exists in a variety of performative contexts from the time of its original composition until the present. The Bhaktamāl constitutes a major, if largely unacknowledged, element in constructions of Hinduism. This project will closely consider the Bhaktamāl and its subsequent iterations and uses in a variety of contexts. In so doing, it will trace the closely related strands of religious, linguistic, and political consolidation from the early seventeenth century until the beginning of the twentieth century.
