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.
