Description: This book makes a total departure from some well-established notions about bhakti and the Bhakti movement. It questions and rejects the current academic definition of bhakti and the portrayals of the Bhakti movement in the light of that definition. Trying to recapture the generic meaning of the term bhakti, the author postulates that bhakti by itself does not suggest any ideational or doctrinaire position. According to her, a restricted and erroneous definition of bhakti has served as the substratum for all theorisations about the Bhakti movement, when taken as a whole. What is reckoned as the Bhakti movement, she states, is an amalgam of a number of devotional movements of a divergent nature. A monolithic view of these can be taken only if their common denominator bhakti is understood in its generic sense. Not otherwise. In short, the author has called into question the whole conceptual framework and the basic terms of reference used hitherto for the study of bhakti and the Bhakti movement. This is significant since they have had the sanction of more than one hundred years of scholarship, and have not been questioned till now. She has done so on the strength of her being able to trace back the origins of the errors she has underlined. The author has tried to establish the fact that the accepted academic definition of bhakti is a modern construction; and that it was artificially formulated by certain Western Indologists of the nineteenth century with the aid of criteria which had no relevance in the context of Hinduism. The process of its formulation has been examined historiographically in this critique to show how it had gradually taken shape between 1846 and 1909. The reasons for its subsequent incorporation in modern Indian scholarship have also been made clear. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach in this book, Dr. Sharma has grappled with many vital issues related to the Bhakti theme. It is hoped that this erudite work would serve as a landmark in the study of bhakti and the Bhakti movement.

Contributed articles.

In this book, Patton E. Burchett offers a path-breaking genealogical study of devotional (bhakti) Hinduism that traces its understudied historical relationships with tantra, yoga, and Sufism. Beginning in India’s early medieval “Tantric Age” and reaching to the present day, Burchett focuses his analysis on the crucial shifts of the early modern period, when the rise of bhakti communities in North India transformed the religious landscape in ways that would profoundly affect the shape of modern-day Hinduism. A Genealogy of Devotion illuminates the complex historical factors at play in the growth of bhakti in Sultanate and Mughal India through its pivotal interactions with Indic and Persianate traditions of asceticism, monasticism, politics, and literature. Shedding new light on the importance of Persian culture and popular Sufism in the history of devotional Hinduism, Burchett’s work explores the cultural encounters that reshaped early modern North Indian communities. Focusing on the Rāmānandī bhakti community and the tantric Nāth yogīs, Burchett describes the emergence of a new and Sufi-inflected devotional sensibility—an ethical, emotional, and aesthetic disposition—that was often critical of tantric and yogic religiosity. Early modern North Indian devotional critiques of tantric religiosity, he shows, prefigured colonial-era Orientalist depictions of bhakti as “religion” and tantra as “magic.” Providing a broad historical view of bhakti, tantra, and yoga while simultaneously challenging dominant scholarly conceptions of them, A Genealogy of Devotion offers a bold new narrative of the history of religion in India.

Bhakti movement had been an energizing phenomenon that provided a concrete shape and an identifiable face to the abstractions of Sanskrit scriptures. As counterculture, it embraced into its fold all sections of people breaking the barriers of caste, class, community and gender. It added an inclusive dimension to the hitherto privileged, exclusivist, Upanishadic tradition. A primal instinct for unmitigated attachment, total surrender and craving for freedom are at the root of the bhakti tradition. From within, it performed a subversive, reformatory function that changed the dynamics of worship at religious level and challenged the hierarchies at social level. Bhakti literature was marked by spontaneity and ecstasy and hence it produced a rich body of verse born of the heart. The bhasa poets from different castes, regions and religions created a bountiful corpus of literature since eighth century AD in the form of metrical compositions, poems, songs, vachanas, bhajans, keertanas and padams. A heterogeneous group, they are distinguished by non-sectarian attitude, vernacular idiom, faith in divinity, dismissal of rituals and caste, and affinity with the underprivileged sections. Rooted in the age and the soil their literature is unique in that each of them bears his/her unique stamp of a distinct idiom in their dialogue with God who is like any other human being as He exchanged the roles of a lover, beloved, companion, benefactor and guide. Bhakti is as exciting as ever in that it attracts critics into its atmospheric zone over and again, and they come up with multiple interpretations and commentaries. The twenty seven articles in this volume trace the beginnings and growth of bhakti movement and literature as propagated by a number of poet-saints across India up to the twentieth century. The poet-saints discussed in the volume include Andal, Kanakadasa, Mirabai, Kabir, Vemana, Pothana, Annamayya and others. [Subject: Literature, India Studies]

The Indigenous Protest Movement Called Bhakti Movement, Comprising Bhakti Cults Of Many Hues And Colours, Had An Impact On The Status Of Women In India. Many Of Them Tried To Do Away With The Manifold Taboos, Pollutions And Rituals With Which, Hindu Religion Was Cluttered. While Some Accepted The Equality Of Men And Women, Others Reinforced The Inequalities In Practice. The Present Case Study Of Virasaivism, A Populous Sect In Karnataka, Deals With Ther Impact Of This Movement On The Status Of Women. After A Careful Research On A Hundred Families With First And Second-Generation Women, The Author Finds That Precepts And Practices Meet Here In A Unique Way. Child-Training Practices, The Institution Of Marriage, The Family And Kinship System And The Economic And Socio-Religious Life Of Virasaiva Women Enable Them To Enjoy A Comparatively High Status.

Between the third centuries BC and AD were written thousands of verses in Tamil that have collectively come to be known as Sangam literature. The expressions of love between a man and a woman in these love poems gave way to passionate expressions of devotional love, where the heroine became the devotee and the hero became God. Through the centuries of patriarchy, women negotiated varied levels of existence and largely went unnoticed until they found a path for self-expression through bhakti or devotion. While the dominant form of worship was to prostrate before God, women found innovative ways of personal expression, often seeing the lord as a lover, friend, husband, or even son. The individual outpourings and the unfettered voices of these women refused to be drowned in the din of patriarchy gathering momentum until this became a pan India movement. In For the Love of God, Sandhya Mulchandani delves deep into historical accounts of these women who fell in love with God.

In India, religion continues to be an absolutely vital source for social as well as personal identity. All manner of groups--political, occupational, and social--remain grounded in specific religious communities. This book analyzes the development of the modern Hindu and Sikh communities in North India starting from about the fifteenth century, when the dominant bhakti tradition of Hinduism became divided into two currents: the sagun and the nirgun. The sagun current, led mostly by Brahmins, has remained dominant in most of North India and has served as the ideological base of the development of modern Hindu nationalism. Several chapters explore the rise of this religious and political movement, paying particular attention to the role played by devotion to Ram. Alternative trends do exist in sagun tradition, however, and are represented here by chapters on the low-caste saint Chokhamel and the tantric sect founded by Kina Ram. The nirgun current, led mostly by persons of Ksand artisan castes, formed the base of both the Sikh community, founded by Guru Nanak, and of various non-Brahmin sectarian movements derived from such saints as Kabir, Raidas, Dadu, and Shiv Dayal Singh. Two chapters discuss the formation of a distinctive Sikh theology and a Sikh community identity separate from that of the Hindus. Other chapters discuss the validity of the sagun-nirgun distinction within Hindu tradition and the interplay of social and religious ideas in nirgun hagiographic texts and in sectarian movements such as the Adi Dharma Mission and the Radhasoami Satsang.