Patton Burchett | College of William and Mary (original) (raw)
Books by Patton Burchett
Columbia University Press, 2019
In this book, Patton E. Burchett offers a path-breaking genealogi-cal study of devotional (bhakti... more In this book, Patton E. Burchett offers a path-breaking genealogi-cal study of devotional (bhakti) Hinduism that traces its under-studied 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.
Journal Articles & Book Chapters by Patton Burchett
Religions, 2024
This essay discusses the virtues of hagiology-driven teaching and the pedagogical value of the sa... more This essay discusses the virtues of hagiology-driven teaching and the pedagogical value of the saint in the religious studies classroom, focusing on how a series of class assignments and activities centered on the Indian devotional saint Kabir function in an undergraduate introductory-level religious studies course to effectively engage student learning and to develop students’ understanding of the politics of religion and the crucial interplay of affect, memory, and story-telling in religious life.
Miracles: An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy, 2022
This essay explores the important connection between the miraculous and the ethical, primarily th... more This essay explores the important connection between the miraculous and the ethical, primarily through a study of early modern Hindu devotional (bhakti) traditions. It investigates the role of ethics in categorizing different forms of wonder (e.g., as "miracle" versus "magic") and examines the way that the specific narrative form of the miracle story often functions to cultivate virtues and ethical dispositions in its audiences. After illustrating a crucial distinction between the meanings of the term/category "miracle" in modern and pre-modern times, the essay delves into the hagiographical literature of a Mughal-period North Indian bhakti community in order to demonstrate how its miracle tales work as pedagogical devices for cultivating a distinctive social ethic of giving and service.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2021
Roundtable on Living Neoliberalism: Negotiating Markets and Morality Outside the West
![Research paper thumbnail of The Tantric Age: Tantra and Bhakti in Medieval India (Ch. 1 in A Genealogy of Devotion [proof])](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/65424652/thumbnails/1.jpg)
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South Asian History and Culture, 2020
This paper interrogates popular narratives regarding the spread of Vaisṇavism in early modern No... more This paper interrogates popular narratives regarding the spread of Vaisṇavism in early modern North India through an examination of the memory of the Rāmānandī ascetic and bhakti saint Krishnadās Payahārī. Payahārī is remembered as a pious, Nāth Yogi-defeating wonder worker as well as a powerful figure in the political sphere, directly responsible for the conversion of kings from Śaiva-Śākta tantric religion to Vaisṇava devotion. Examining oral traditions from Rajasthan, Panjab, and the Western Himalayas, along with seventeenth-century hagiographical texts, while also drawing upon ethnographic research at sites where Payahārī is actively remembered and revered today, this paper offers insights into the mythological function of Payahārī as emblematic Vaisṇava ascetic, the historical relations of Vaisṇava (bhakti) and Śaiva-Śākta (tantric) religiosity in Mughal India, the role of ascetics and monastic communities in this period and its remembrance, and the beguiling presence of Payahārī and his memory today. In particular, we investigate the enduring effects of Mughal influence on the Western Himalayas in the puzzling, still vital place of Payahārī and a Vaisṇava state deity in the social life of the Śaiva-Śākta- dominated Kullu Valley.
![Research paper thumbnail of The Rise of Vaisnava Devotion in North India: On the Origins of a Mughal Bhakti Sensibility [PROOFS]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/64735444/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Routledge Handbook of South Asian Religions, 2020
Assess's David G. White's thesis that bhakti has had unjustified historiographical prominence in ... more Assess's David G. White's thesis that bhakti has had unjustified historiographical prominence in the field and is a religion of the urban elite.
This chapter seeks to account for the historical rise of Vaiṣṇava devotionalism (bhakti) in North India, situating Vaiṣṇava bhakti’s early modern ascendance in relation to earlier predominant tantric religious modes, the influence of Sufism and Persianate culture, and the larger social, political, and economic contexts of Sultanate and Mughal India. I focus on the specific qualitative texture—the sensibility—of early modern North Indian bhakti and how it came into being, while also questioning the homogenous characterization and normative (“mainstream”) position typically given to bhakti in standard historiographical narratives of South Asian religion. As I argue, the emotional, aesthetic, and ethical sensibility characterizing the bhakti public of Mughal India was not something perennial, lying in wait to be released by the forces of vernacularization, but was a distinctive product of historically specific forces and actors.
Journal of Vaishnava Studies 28.1, 2019
International Journal of Hindu Studies, 2018
The paper examines the memory and hagiography of the important but little-researched late sixteen... more The paper examines the memory and hagiography of the important but little-researched late sixteenth-century bhakti saint Agradas. After introducing this influential Vaisnava devotional poet and the Ram rasik tradition he is said to have founded, the paper explores the political realities and motivations behind the molding of Agradas's hagiography in particular ways in the nineteenth century and how his saintly authority has been drawn upon in modern times. Through a case study of Agradas, the paper makes an argument about the totemic function of the Hindu saint as a tangible expression of the intangible values and sentiments that bond and mobilize religious communities.
The Journal of Hindu Studies, 2013
This article explores bhakti attitudes towards Tantra in early modern north India by focusing spe... more This article explores bhakti attitudes towards Tantra in early modern north India by focusing specifically on the figure of the tantric yoga as healer in bhakti poems and hagiographies. A phenomenal rise of devotional (bhakti) literature and communities occurred in Mughal India and scholarship has neglected to examine how bhakti's ascent took place in conjunction with, and even depended on, the marginalisation of formerly dominant tantric religious paradigms. This article aims to shed some light on this historical development by demonstrating the way in which early modern north Indian bhakti literature marked the utter powerlessness of the tantric yogas' tantra-mantra against either the snake of viraha (love in separation from the Divine) or the snake of m@y@ (that worldly delusion and desire that bind us in suffering and prevent liberation).
Yoga Powers: Extraordinary Capacities Attained …, 2011
This essay analyzes a genre of episodes in sufi and bhakti hagiographical literature involving co... more This essay analyzes a genre of episodes in sufi and bhakti hagiographical literature involving confrontations and spiritual competitions with yogīs My intention is to draw out a key distinction between the categories of 'miracle' and 'magic' that seems to exist in both the sufi and bhakti traditions I propose that in examining this miracle/magic distinction and the conceptions of God and appropriate religious behavior linked to it in these hagiographies, we can demonstrate a potential area of sufi influence on 'the bhakti movement' while also providing evidence for a marginalization and 'magicalization' of tantra which seems to have occurred in parallel with the rise of bhakti in early modern north India since the early twentieth century, the history of bhakti has generally been told in terms of 'the bhakti movement ' 2 As typically conceived, "the bhakti movement" was "a transformatory avalanche in terms of devotion and social reform" that began in south India between the sixth and ninth centuries ce with the Śaiva nāyaṇārs and vaiṣṇava Āḷvārs and swept its way across the subcontinent and into the north as a single, coherent movement 3 This relatively recent term 1 I am indebted to
International Journal of Hindu Studies, 2009
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2008
Other Publications by Patton Burchett
Religious Studies News - Spotlight on Teaching, 2016
Book Reviews by Patton Burchett
In this book, Peter Gottschalk offers a detailed and insightful study of how ascendant European n... more In this book, Peter Gottschalk offers a detailed and insightful study of how ascendant European notions of science, along with assumptions about India's essentially religious character, fundamentally informed the knowledge produced about India and Indians during the colonial period. Continuing a research interest in village north India that characterized his first work, Beyond Hindu and Muslim (Oxford UP, 2000), Gottschalk examines a wide range of British and Indian representations of the village of Chainpur (in the state of Bihar) from the late eighteenth to the earlier twentieth century. In his examination of travelers, land surveyors, census administrators, ethnologists, folklorists, archeologists, and others who came to and wrote about Chainpur, he demonstrates that religion repeatedly served as a primary categorical frame for understanding and representing the Indian people. The rising discourse of "science" and the specialized forms of knowledge produced by emerging "scientific" disciplines served to emphasize and authorize the notion of religion's centrality (as a mutually exclusive social marker) in India.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2016
The product of over a decade of research, Linda Hess's new book on oralperformative traditions of... more The product of over a decade of research, Linda Hess's new book on oralperformative traditions of songs attributed to the fifteenth-century north Indian poet-saint Kabir is remarkable for the insight it brings to a wide range of important topics-among them, the relationship of textuality and orality, the question of "authenticity," the embodied experience of oral-performative traditions, and the tension between "outer" sociopolitical struggles and "inner" spiritual pursuits. More than that, however, this book stands out in the intimacy, sincerity, and readability of its style. Hess has long been a preeminent scholar of Kabir, but whereas her previous publications were generally works grounded in manuscript research and careful text-critical scholarship, Bodies of Song is the result of a more embodied study of "literature that lives in performance" (16). It is, on the one hand, an immersion into the lives of singers and listeners of Kabir and, on the other hand, a reflection upon Hess's own personal experience imbibing Kabir over many years in the context of "live performance[s] where physical bodies are interacting, and where sound is produced by singers and heard by listeners who are present in the same place at the same time" (9).
Reviews of A Genealogy of Devotion by Patton Burchett
Reading Religion, 2022
Patton Burchett’s A Genealogy of Devotion: Bhakti, Tantra, Yoga, and Sufism in North India is an ... more Patton Burchett’s A Genealogy of Devotion: Bhakti, Tantra, Yoga, and Sufism in North India is an ambitious expansion of his dissertation on the Rāmānandīs of Galta, who are an instructive test case to examine the development of Hindu bhakti identity in early modernity. Burchett contextualizes his research against a magisterial historical backdrop, offering many crucial interventions on early modern Indian religion, including the precolonial provenance of the divide between legitimate and illegitimate religion (bhakti vs. Tantra), the crucial role that Tantra played in the development of bhakti, and the “Sufi inflected” bhakti that has come to define modern Hinduism.
Arc: The Journal of the School of Religious Studies 47, 172–178, 2019
Burchett has injected further nuance into the persisting popular and scholarly narrative that dev... more Burchett has injected further nuance into the persisting popular and scholarly narrative that devotional religiosity spread throughout India by way of a unified "bhakti movement." Utilizing historical and text-critical approaches, in addition to a wealth of secondary sources, Burchett argues that the ostensibly discrete categories of tantric, yogic, and Islamic religiosity are all imbricated in the historical formations of North Indian bhakti. In the process, he advocates for bhakti movements in the plural, suggesting that "we would be better served to imagine that at different times, each of the various regions of India had its own distinctive, multivocal bhakti movement shaped by regionally and historically specific social, political, and cultural factors" (2). Burchett characterizes the early modern North Indian devotional movement as the growth of a "transregional, transsectarian bhakti sensibifity" united by similar aesthetic tastes, a common moral sense, and shared valuation of emotional expression (17). This sensibifity was heavily influenced by the Sufism of the Sultanate and Mughal periods, so Islam plays a significant role in Burchett's historiography of North Indian bhakti, marking a major challenge to the Hindu nationalist implications of a singular "movement" (82).
Journal of the American Oriental Society, 2021
The study of the devotional tradition, or Bhakti, of North India has made much progress in recent... more The study of the devotional tradition, or Bhakti, of North India has made much progress in recent years. A major trailblazer in the field, John Stratton Hawley, has fostered a group of excellent PhD students at Barnard College in New York, who have gone on to publish innovative research on the topic. Patton E. Burchett, now assistant professor at the College of William and Mary, is one of them. His ambitious new book is an impressive feat, the result of over a decade of work. Rooted in his original research on an important yet relatively less studied Bhakti group, the Rāmānandīs, this book offers a fresh take on the early modern religious scene in North India. It foregrounds the contentious interactions and exchanges of Bhakti with other strands now subsumed under the umbrella term "Hinduism," notably Tantra and Yoga, and with the mystical strand of Islam, Sufism (these "strands" joining and unraveling are nicely portrayed as threads of rope on the cover image). One of the book's main agendas is to push beyond the "colonial construct" narrative that dismisses concepts like Tantra as orientalist. Beyond categories, Burchett looks at dynamic movements, each changing over time in mutual interaction. Burchett's study is very ambitious, offering a longue durée perspective of North Indian religious development from 1450 to 1750, but with frequent excursus into what came before and after. The result is a magisterial overview incorporating exciting recent research into a coherent narrative. This book differs from other "genealogies" of Bhakti in its foregrounding of historical sociopolitical factors over philosophy. Whereas traditional narratives typically start with South Indian debates around Advaita, Burchett places religion squarely in the strife and bustle of sociopolitical developments.
Journal of Asian Studies (2021)
knowledge about the Indian tradition. In Rolland's words, "oceanic feeling" is a subjective feeli... more knowledge about the Indian tradition. In Rolland's words, "oceanic feeling" is a subjective feeling or sentiment free of any "dogma, all credo, all church organization, all sacred books, all hope in personal survival etc., the simple and direct fact of the feeling of the 'eternal'"an oceanic feeling (p. 60, Rolland's letter to Freud dated December 5, 1927). Freud initially expressed his disagreement with Rolland but later, with reluctance, Freud admitted the "oceanic feeling" as part of the metapsychology. However, Freud did not accept the claim that this feeling is "the source of religious needs" (p. 65). Interestingly, the last part of the book reenters the "Oedipus" debate through Bose's gift of a Visnu Anantadeva statue to Freud. Ananta is the snake whose coil serves as Visnu's seat and can be regarded as symbolizing "unconsciousness" (p. 195). Hiltebeitel provides a fascinating account of the backstory of the Visnu statue being presented to Freud by the Indian Psychoanalytical Society (perhaps with an oblique objective of making a symbolic argument about the goddess and the mother deity through the gift). In the end, one is left wondering about the title Freud's Mahabharata, given that Freud never engaged with the Mahabharata directly, even though Hiltebeitel concedes this at the very outset in the preface. On reading Freud's India, I am also inclined to muse on the state of psychoanalysis in India after this initial phase. Perhaps it would have been prudent to give brief consideration to post-Bose developments in the book. Nevertheless, both volumes push the boundaries, further providing a glimpse of a unique sangam (a holy intersection) of Western and Indian philosophical traditions. In Hiltebeitel's words, "it [the book] is meant to catch the eye of two chief groups of prospective readers: those interested in Freud and Psychoanalysis, and those interested in India" (p. ix). In my view, both books deploy an extraordinary blend of history, anthropology, and inherent ideas about religious distinction between the East and the West in the ancient texts and the writings of the modern thinkers (Freud and Bose). They provide a comprehensive and deep analysis of the historical landscape of psychoanalysis through Freud, Bose, and the Mahabharata. These works will prove valuable for students interested in religion, history, rituals, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. An additional treat is Hiltebeitel's own reflections and takeaways.
Columbia University Press, 2019
In this book, Patton E. Burchett offers a path-breaking genealogi-cal study of devotional (bhakti... more In this book, Patton E. Burchett offers a path-breaking genealogi-cal study of devotional (bhakti) Hinduism that traces its under-studied 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.
Religions, 2024
This essay discusses the virtues of hagiology-driven teaching and the pedagogical value of the sa... more This essay discusses the virtues of hagiology-driven teaching and the pedagogical value of the saint in the religious studies classroom, focusing on how a series of class assignments and activities centered on the Indian devotional saint Kabir function in an undergraduate introductory-level religious studies course to effectively engage student learning and to develop students’ understanding of the politics of religion and the crucial interplay of affect, memory, and story-telling in religious life.
Miracles: An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy, 2022
This essay explores the important connection between the miraculous and the ethical, primarily th... more This essay explores the important connection between the miraculous and the ethical, primarily through a study of early modern Hindu devotional (bhakti) traditions. It investigates the role of ethics in categorizing different forms of wonder (e.g., as "miracle" versus "magic") and examines the way that the specific narrative form of the miracle story often functions to cultivate virtues and ethical dispositions in its audiences. After illustrating a crucial distinction between the meanings of the term/category "miracle" in modern and pre-modern times, the essay delves into the hagiographical literature of a Mughal-period North Indian bhakti community in order to demonstrate how its miracle tales work as pedagogical devices for cultivating a distinctive social ethic of giving and service.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2021
Roundtable on Living Neoliberalism: Negotiating Markets and Morality Outside the West
South Asian History and Culture, 2020
This paper interrogates popular narratives regarding the spread of Vaisṇavism in early modern No... more This paper interrogates popular narratives regarding the spread of Vaisṇavism in early modern North India through an examination of the memory of the Rāmānandī ascetic and bhakti saint Krishnadās Payahārī. Payahārī is remembered as a pious, Nāth Yogi-defeating wonder worker as well as a powerful figure in the political sphere, directly responsible for the conversion of kings from Śaiva-Śākta tantric religion to Vaisṇava devotion. Examining oral traditions from Rajasthan, Panjab, and the Western Himalayas, along with seventeenth-century hagiographical texts, while also drawing upon ethnographic research at sites where Payahārī is actively remembered and revered today, this paper offers insights into the mythological function of Payahārī as emblematic Vaisṇava ascetic, the historical relations of Vaisṇava (bhakti) and Śaiva-Śākta (tantric) religiosity in Mughal India, the role of ascetics and monastic communities in this period and its remembrance, and the beguiling presence of Payahārī and his memory today. In particular, we investigate the enduring effects of Mughal influence on the Western Himalayas in the puzzling, still vital place of Payahārī and a Vaisṇava state deity in the social life of the Śaiva-Śākta- dominated Kullu Valley.
Routledge Handbook of South Asian Religions, 2020
Assess's David G. White's thesis that bhakti has had unjustified historiographical prominence in ... more Assess's David G. White's thesis that bhakti has had unjustified historiographical prominence in the field and is a religion of the urban elite.
This chapter seeks to account for the historical rise of Vaiṣṇava devotionalism (bhakti) in North India, situating Vaiṣṇava bhakti’s early modern ascendance in relation to earlier predominant tantric religious modes, the influence of Sufism and Persianate culture, and the larger social, political, and economic contexts of Sultanate and Mughal India. I focus on the specific qualitative texture—the sensibility—of early modern North Indian bhakti and how it came into being, while also questioning the homogenous characterization and normative (“mainstream”) position typically given to bhakti in standard historiographical narratives of South Asian religion. As I argue, the emotional, aesthetic, and ethical sensibility characterizing the bhakti public of Mughal India was not something perennial, lying in wait to be released by the forces of vernacularization, but was a distinctive product of historically specific forces and actors.
Journal of Vaishnava Studies 28.1, 2019
International Journal of Hindu Studies, 2018
The paper examines the memory and hagiography of the important but little-researched late sixteen... more The paper examines the memory and hagiography of the important but little-researched late sixteenth-century bhakti saint Agradas. After introducing this influential Vaisnava devotional poet and the Ram rasik tradition he is said to have founded, the paper explores the political realities and motivations behind the molding of Agradas's hagiography in particular ways in the nineteenth century and how his saintly authority has been drawn upon in modern times. Through a case study of Agradas, the paper makes an argument about the totemic function of the Hindu saint as a tangible expression of the intangible values and sentiments that bond and mobilize religious communities.
The Journal of Hindu Studies, 2013
This article explores bhakti attitudes towards Tantra in early modern north India by focusing spe... more This article explores bhakti attitudes towards Tantra in early modern north India by focusing specifically on the figure of the tantric yoga as healer in bhakti poems and hagiographies. A phenomenal rise of devotional (bhakti) literature and communities occurred in Mughal India and scholarship has neglected to examine how bhakti's ascent took place in conjunction with, and even depended on, the marginalisation of formerly dominant tantric religious paradigms. This article aims to shed some light on this historical development by demonstrating the way in which early modern north Indian bhakti literature marked the utter powerlessness of the tantric yogas' tantra-mantra against either the snake of viraha (love in separation from the Divine) or the snake of m@y@ (that worldly delusion and desire that bind us in suffering and prevent liberation).
Yoga Powers: Extraordinary Capacities Attained …, 2011
This essay analyzes a genre of episodes in sufi and bhakti hagiographical literature involving co... more This essay analyzes a genre of episodes in sufi and bhakti hagiographical literature involving confrontations and spiritual competitions with yogīs My intention is to draw out a key distinction between the categories of 'miracle' and 'magic' that seems to exist in both the sufi and bhakti traditions I propose that in examining this miracle/magic distinction and the conceptions of God and appropriate religious behavior linked to it in these hagiographies, we can demonstrate a potential area of sufi influence on 'the bhakti movement' while also providing evidence for a marginalization and 'magicalization' of tantra which seems to have occurred in parallel with the rise of bhakti in early modern north India since the early twentieth century, the history of bhakti has generally been told in terms of 'the bhakti movement ' 2 As typically conceived, "the bhakti movement" was "a transformatory avalanche in terms of devotion and social reform" that began in south India between the sixth and ninth centuries ce with the Śaiva nāyaṇārs and vaiṣṇava Āḷvārs and swept its way across the subcontinent and into the north as a single, coherent movement 3 This relatively recent term 1 I am indebted to
International Journal of Hindu Studies, 2009
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2008
In this book, Peter Gottschalk offers a detailed and insightful study of how ascendant European n... more In this book, Peter Gottschalk offers a detailed and insightful study of how ascendant European notions of science, along with assumptions about India's essentially religious character, fundamentally informed the knowledge produced about India and Indians during the colonial period. Continuing a research interest in village north India that characterized his first work, Beyond Hindu and Muslim (Oxford UP, 2000), Gottschalk examines a wide range of British and Indian representations of the village of Chainpur (in the state of Bihar) from the late eighteenth to the earlier twentieth century. In his examination of travelers, land surveyors, census administrators, ethnologists, folklorists, archeologists, and others who came to and wrote about Chainpur, he demonstrates that religion repeatedly served as a primary categorical frame for understanding and representing the Indian people. The rising discourse of "science" and the specialized forms of knowledge produced by emerging "scientific" disciplines served to emphasize and authorize the notion of religion's centrality (as a mutually exclusive social marker) in India.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2016
The product of over a decade of research, Linda Hess's new book on oralperformative traditions of... more The product of over a decade of research, Linda Hess's new book on oralperformative traditions of songs attributed to the fifteenth-century north Indian poet-saint Kabir is remarkable for the insight it brings to a wide range of important topics-among them, the relationship of textuality and orality, the question of "authenticity," the embodied experience of oral-performative traditions, and the tension between "outer" sociopolitical struggles and "inner" spiritual pursuits. More than that, however, this book stands out in the intimacy, sincerity, and readability of its style. Hess has long been a preeminent scholar of Kabir, but whereas her previous publications were generally works grounded in manuscript research and careful text-critical scholarship, Bodies of Song is the result of a more embodied study of "literature that lives in performance" (16). It is, on the one hand, an immersion into the lives of singers and listeners of Kabir and, on the other hand, a reflection upon Hess's own personal experience imbibing Kabir over many years in the context of "live performance[s] where physical bodies are interacting, and where sound is produced by singers and heard by listeners who are present in the same place at the same time" (9).
Reading Religion, 2022
Patton Burchett’s A Genealogy of Devotion: Bhakti, Tantra, Yoga, and Sufism in North India is an ... more Patton Burchett’s A Genealogy of Devotion: Bhakti, Tantra, Yoga, and Sufism in North India is an ambitious expansion of his dissertation on the Rāmānandīs of Galta, who are an instructive test case to examine the development of Hindu bhakti identity in early modernity. Burchett contextualizes his research against a magisterial historical backdrop, offering many crucial interventions on early modern Indian religion, including the precolonial provenance of the divide between legitimate and illegitimate religion (bhakti vs. Tantra), the crucial role that Tantra played in the development of bhakti, and the “Sufi inflected” bhakti that has come to define modern Hinduism.
Arc: The Journal of the School of Religious Studies 47, 172–178, 2019
Burchett has injected further nuance into the persisting popular and scholarly narrative that dev... more Burchett has injected further nuance into the persisting popular and scholarly narrative that devotional religiosity spread throughout India by way of a unified "bhakti movement." Utilizing historical and text-critical approaches, in addition to a wealth of secondary sources, Burchett argues that the ostensibly discrete categories of tantric, yogic, and Islamic religiosity are all imbricated in the historical formations of North Indian bhakti. In the process, he advocates for bhakti movements in the plural, suggesting that "we would be better served to imagine that at different times, each of the various regions of India had its own distinctive, multivocal bhakti movement shaped by regionally and historically specific social, political, and cultural factors" (2). Burchett characterizes the early modern North Indian devotional movement as the growth of a "transregional, transsectarian bhakti sensibifity" united by similar aesthetic tastes, a common moral sense, and shared valuation of emotional expression (17). This sensibifity was heavily influenced by the Sufism of the Sultanate and Mughal periods, so Islam plays a significant role in Burchett's historiography of North Indian bhakti, marking a major challenge to the Hindu nationalist implications of a singular "movement" (82).
Journal of the American Oriental Society, 2021
The study of the devotional tradition, or Bhakti, of North India has made much progress in recent... more The study of the devotional tradition, or Bhakti, of North India has made much progress in recent years. A major trailblazer in the field, John Stratton Hawley, has fostered a group of excellent PhD students at Barnard College in New York, who have gone on to publish innovative research on the topic. Patton E. Burchett, now assistant professor at the College of William and Mary, is one of them. His ambitious new book is an impressive feat, the result of over a decade of work. Rooted in his original research on an important yet relatively less studied Bhakti group, the Rāmānandīs, this book offers a fresh take on the early modern religious scene in North India. It foregrounds the contentious interactions and exchanges of Bhakti with other strands now subsumed under the umbrella term "Hinduism," notably Tantra and Yoga, and with the mystical strand of Islam, Sufism (these "strands" joining and unraveling are nicely portrayed as threads of rope on the cover image). One of the book's main agendas is to push beyond the "colonial construct" narrative that dismisses concepts like Tantra as orientalist. Beyond categories, Burchett looks at dynamic movements, each changing over time in mutual interaction. Burchett's study is very ambitious, offering a longue durée perspective of North Indian religious development from 1450 to 1750, but with frequent excursus into what came before and after. The result is a magisterial overview incorporating exciting recent research into a coherent narrative. This book differs from other "genealogies" of Bhakti in its foregrounding of historical sociopolitical factors over philosophy. Whereas traditional narratives typically start with South Indian debates around Advaita, Burchett places religion squarely in the strife and bustle of sociopolitical developments.
Journal of Asian Studies (2021)
knowledge about the Indian tradition. In Rolland's words, "oceanic feeling" is a subjective feeli... more knowledge about the Indian tradition. In Rolland's words, "oceanic feeling" is a subjective feeling or sentiment free of any "dogma, all credo, all church organization, all sacred books, all hope in personal survival etc., the simple and direct fact of the feeling of the 'eternal'"an oceanic feeling (p. 60, Rolland's letter to Freud dated December 5, 1927). Freud initially expressed his disagreement with Rolland but later, with reluctance, Freud admitted the "oceanic feeling" as part of the metapsychology. However, Freud did not accept the claim that this feeling is "the source of religious needs" (p. 65). Interestingly, the last part of the book reenters the "Oedipus" debate through Bose's gift of a Visnu Anantadeva statue to Freud. Ananta is the snake whose coil serves as Visnu's seat and can be regarded as symbolizing "unconsciousness" (p. 195). Hiltebeitel provides a fascinating account of the backstory of the Visnu statue being presented to Freud by the Indian Psychoanalytical Society (perhaps with an oblique objective of making a symbolic argument about the goddess and the mother deity through the gift). In the end, one is left wondering about the title Freud's Mahabharata, given that Freud never engaged with the Mahabharata directly, even though Hiltebeitel concedes this at the very outset in the preface. On reading Freud's India, I am also inclined to muse on the state of psychoanalysis in India after this initial phase. Perhaps it would have been prudent to give brief consideration to post-Bose developments in the book. Nevertheless, both volumes push the boundaries, further providing a glimpse of a unique sangam (a holy intersection) of Western and Indian philosophical traditions. In Hiltebeitel's words, "it [the book] is meant to catch the eye of two chief groups of prospective readers: those interested in Freud and Psychoanalysis, and those interested in India" (p. ix). In my view, both books deploy an extraordinary blend of history, anthropology, and inherent ideas about religious distinction between the East and the West in the ancient texts and the writings of the modern thinkers (Freud and Bose). They provide a comprehensive and deep analysis of the historical landscape of psychoanalysis through Freud, Bose, and the Mahabharata. These works will prove valuable for students interested in religion, history, rituals, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. An additional treat is Hiltebeitel's own reflections and takeaways.
American Historical Review, 2021
erly place the legacy of Aurangzeb and the greater military colonization of the East India Compan... more erly place the legacy of Aurangzeb and the greater military colonization of the East India Company. In such a sweeping survey, there are bound to be some shortcuts. The concept of "Persianate" itself remains undertheorized, as is the relationship between Persian and Marathi, Bangla, Hindavi, and other literary cultures. Further, there is an ambiguity between Persianate as a literary, cultural, and political concept versus an ethnic one; how to parse it alongside "Indo-Timurid," "Turko-Mongol," "Afghan," and other ethnically "nativist" categories, all of which are used in different registers. A more robust sketching of the relationship between sacral social and political actors-the sant, the bhakti, the Sufi, and the yogi-and the making of Persianate India could have added to our rediscovery of the religious dynamism in this hyper eventful period. In some instances, Eaton uses terms anachronistically, like "immigration" or "indirect rule" and even "settler colonialism." That aside, it is undeniable that Eaton has not only provided a broad and defining summation of his own extraordinarily rich scholarship but also incorporated a wide array of recent scholarship in his synthesis. The volume comes at a time when the contemporary politics of history in the subcontinent rest on a nativist, anti-Muslim claim to the past. The clear, historically grounded, richly documented history of belonging detailed by Eaton is a timely antidote to the separatist ideologies of Hindutva or Islamism.
Religious Studies Review 46.1, 2020
Religious Studies Review • VOLUME 46 • NUMBER 1 • MARCH 2020 116 line with RSBN's emphasis on the... more Religious Studies Review • VOLUME 46 • NUMBER 1 • MARCH 2020 116 line with RSBN's emphasis on the importance of region (defined variously by language, religious complexity, history, and social diversity, among other factors-although a more intentional investigation of "region" as a key category would have strengthened this volume), the nine papers cover three regions: the Dravidian south (4 papers), Maharashtra (3 papers), and the Avadhi-Sanskrit area in what is now eastern Uttar Pradesh (2 papers). The guiding theme of the book is that in contrast to the common stereotype of bhakti as an inherently irenic mode of religiosity (think of V. Raghavan's characterization of the bhakti poets as The Great Integrators or M. Hedayetullah's characterization of Kabir as The Apostle of Hindu-Muslim Unity ), in many cases bhakti poets and intellectuals worked to create their identity-and whom they, therefore, considered to be bhakti insiders-by forcefully criticizing those whom they viewed as misguided and ignorant "others." These were outsiders who worshiped false gods, followed false gurus, and adhered to false doctrines. Among the mistaken others-people, deities, theologies, philosophiesare Jains, goddess worshippers, the goddesses themselves, Vaiṣṇava Brahmins, Untouchables, Muslims, fakīrs , foreign ( mleccha , yavana ) Muslim rulers, "errant" Brahmins who serve kings instead of devoting themselves to śāstric and Vedic praxis, scoundrels ( khala ), people sunk in the ignorance of the Kali Yuga, heretical advocates of nirguṇa theology, and Mīmāṃsaka atheism. The bhakti "selves" that create such others, in turn, incorporate an equally wide range of people, deities, and theologies under various bhakti big tents. Bhakti and bhakti communities have been complexly multiple in South Asian history and culture, rather than being a single "bhakti movement." The authors emphasize that the sources they study are as much rhetorical polemics as they are sociologically accurate descriptions. This book joins a number of other recent edited volumes and monographs that show the investigation and interrogation of bhakti(s) to be a vital center of the study of religion in South Asia.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion (JAAR), 2020
H-Net Reviews , 2020
Commissioned by Sumit Guha (The University of Texas at Austin) If one was to simplify, the book u... more Commissioned by Sumit Guha (The University of Texas at Austin) If one was to simplify, the book under review could be said to fall under what is popularly called comparative religion, except that it emphatically does not fall under this genre as the scholarship that it contains forcefully argues against the essen-tialist definition of religion. The crux of this book is about delineating what was new in the bhakti that emerged in North India during the medieval and early modern periods and how devotional communities that evolved around it aligned or disagreed with each other. Bhakti, tantra, yoga, and Sufism as important elements in the subtitle of A Genealogy of Devotion allude to these religious communities and give an impression that each of these religiosities will emerge as a distinct subject of discussion in the book. On the contrary, what Patton Burchett has ably done is to weave the in-terlinkages between them, suggesting that the boundaries around each were not rigid. In narrating the historical relationships between them, this book nonetheless shows that each of these strands also had distinct features that kept its individual identity intact. Thus, fluidity on the one hand as the harbinger of possible exchanges co-existed with concerted efforts of the practitioners of these religiosities to define oneself as distinct from the "other." These multiple sensibilities are complex to explain, and it is this heterogeneity and complexity that Burchett has carefully brought to the fore, thus establishing that neither binaries of opposition , nor distinct personalities of uniqueness remain historical subjects of enquiry for long. The most central issue in the book that is consciously highlighted is that each of these religiosities evolved against the complex politico-historical circumstances from the early medieval to the early modern period. This period concomitantly saw the emergence of Persianate traditions that then fruitfully fertilized with the Indic ones. It is this particu-larity of the historical context against which religious ideas evolved that is the essence of the book. The various chapters then unravel how this happened , what were the challenges and institutional impetus and most importantly, the ideological influences that transformed the religious landscape of North India during this period. Burchett does a microlevel regional case study of the Rāmānandīs to illustrate his arguments.
Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 2019
Journal of Vaishnava Studies, 2019