bhakti | Blogging South Asian Publications

A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement, by John Stratton Hawley, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015, pp. 438 + xiv

Bhakti (devotion) has come to be recognized as a central concept in Hindu traditions and practices. This was a rather late discovery in the history of ideas, as nineteenth century Indologists (encouraged by mostly Brahman informants) tended to focus on philosophy.[1] Now one of the pioneers of academic study of bhakti traditions, John Stratton Hawley of Columbia University, has written a history of the idea of the bhakti movement. This is a landmark study worthy of wide reading and deep discussion.

Hawley begins with an explanation of his “storm of songs” title, a phrase from Rabindranath Tagore. He then moves into an important discussion of bhakti:

“Bhakti” is usually translated as devotion, but if that word connotes something entirely private and quiet, we are in need of other words. Bhakti is heart religion, sometimes cool and quiescent but sometimes hot—the religion of participation, community, enthusiasm, song, and often personal challenge, the sort of thing that coursed through the Protestant Great Awakenings in the history of the United States. It evokes a widely shared religiosity for which institutional superstructures weren’t all that relevant, and which, once activated, could be historically contagious—a glorious disease of the collective heart. (2)

The focus on a community of bhaktas is important as it contrasts with sterile traditional Christian analyses of Hindu traditions. Hawley specifically rebukes an aspect of this once-popular misrepresentation:

Outsiders like the great linguist George Grierson sometimes confused it [bhakti] for personal monotheism, and modern-day Hindus have often followed suit, but in the idea of the bhakti movement we have the affirmation that the nature or number of the deity/deities concerned is secondary. What matters is the heartfelt, intrinsically social sense of connectedness that emerges in the worshipper. That socially divine sense of connectedness traces a pulmonary system that makes the nation throb with life. (4)

But “the idea of the bhakti movement” is the focus of this book, and Hawley finds the idea lacking in historical validity. In the process of examining this idea and its historical roots, far too many interesting insights are developed for mention in this review. This is truly a book that must be read by anyone interested in the idea of bhakti.

Hawley’s alternative history to the idea of the bhakti movement is rather nuanced; he proposes a “bhakti network” (295-312, referred to as a “crazy quilt,” 310) comprised of numerous bhakti movements rather than a single bhakti movement. This might seem rather trivial, but it represents a significant shift in thinking, and some of Hawley’s suggested reasons (see later in this review) for the widespread acceptance of the standard construct of “the bhakti movement” are certainly not trivial.

Hawley presents the case that the idea of a singular bhakti movement can be traced to Hazariprasad Dvivedi (1907-1979).[2] The standard form of the story is increasingly well known from the Bhagavata Mahatmya (a short poem of praise for the Bhagavata Purana), how bhakti was born in south India and grew up in Karnataka before migrating to Maharashtra and Gujarat. Then after a weakening phase there was renewal in Brindavan (Krishna’s holy land, in what is now the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh). Chapter two of this book is a fascinating discussion and deconstruction of this presentation, particularly pointing out that the idea of a single bhakti movement regardless of the focus of devotion (i.e. one movement whether the focus is on Krishna, Ram, Shiva or nirguna brahman) is very far from the intent of the Bhagavata Mahatmya, which is a distinctly Vaishnava text (89).

Hawley shows that the great omission in the Mahatmya’s account of bhakti moving from south to north is the centrality of the Muslim role in the development of Brindavan itself (74ff.) This writing of the Muslim period out of Indian history helped motivate the embracing of the idea of a bhakti movement that united India. The British had developed a rather simplistic pattern of history whereby ancient Hindu empires were taken over by Muslim rulers and the British came in to restore proper rule after the decline of the Muslim period. The bhakti movement idea tied together ancient and modern India while also providing a unifying basis for the movement towards independence. Such nationalistic concerns continue to be important in sustaining the idea of a bhakti movement, and these broader concerns are indeed of interest and importance.

Yet the focus on many aspects of many bhakti movements provides the true treasures of this book. Central to the history, as Hawley sees it, are Surdas and Kabir. (Ramanand, esteemed by tradition as the main link between south and north Indian bhakti traditions, is investigated and the traditions of his centrality are shown to be without historical foundation.) The followers of Surdas and Kabir were so many and so prolific that Hawley concludes “the poets we know as Sur or Kabir are actually bhakti movements in themselves” (274).

There is no evidence that northern poets knew of the earlier southern bhakti poets (307) but there was much borrowing of ideas, styles and even whole poems across the various bhakti movements (297-305). Even these are important ideas that leave one far from the heart of the bhakti network. Throughout the book, stimulating comments appear like the following on the centrality of music to the bhakti idiom.

Consider, too, the musical idiom. Isn’t it striking that the principal nodes in bhakti’s remembered network—the bhaktas of this world—are communicators who operated in a universe where ordinary words ride frequencies of sound that set them apart from their quotidian existence? Here is a mode of interpersonal connection whose very existence depends upon auditory frameworks that set it apart from conversational speech. In this realm of heightened feedback antiphons are frequent, refrains are repeated, and audiences are not only implied but participate in the work of the singer. The way we know who Mirabai or Namdev “is” is to enter into the world they are believed to have created. We pipe into the patterns of vibration—songs—that end with the announcing of their names. Because we do so, this musical network is never really past; it is always present. The fact that these bhakti songs are so often addressed to God, giving plot to divine actions or otherwise relating the bhakta to bhagavan through a process of “puranic” recycling, creates a shortcut for memory. It invites the hearer to act as a character in the story—to reenter it, absorb it, and in a way become the story itself. Thereby, as Christian Novetzke has pointed out, the singer-saint in question turns out to be, on closer inspection, a public. (296-7, referencing Novetzke, Religion and Public Memory: A Cultural History of Saint Namdev in India, New York: Columbia University Press, 2008; Indian edition History, Bhakti and Public Memory: Namdev in Religious and Secular Traditions, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2009)

In his closing chapter, almost necessarily, Hawley raises crucial issues in modern India like the Hindutva and Dalit movements. His book is deconstructing a paradigm of “Hindu history,” and it undermines the Hindutva effort to homogenize Hindu traditions. He clearly feels empathy for Dalits who share the low caste status of Ravidas (333); but this is not a book denigrating the marvel of the bhakti movements that arose and still thrive across India. The standard historical paradigm of a single bhakti movement may be too simplistic and contrived to withstand scrutiny, but Hawley’s closing words reveal his true sentiment about bhakti:

Every nation requires a narrative of itself. This one, incubated in a nation, pushes well beyond that nation. It touches and tests every heart. (341)

[1] Geoffrey Oddie wrote that “There was, indeed, comparatively little discussion of bhakti among European scholars for the greater part of the nineteenth century and it was only in the 1880s and 1890s that Ramanuja’s philosophy, ‘dualism’, and the ideas implicit in the bhakti movement appear to have received much more systematic attention” (Imagined Hinduism: British Protestant Missionary Constructions of Hinduism, 1793-1900, New Delhi: Sage, 2006, pg. 270).

[2] Hawley uses a rather pedantic transliteration/spelling; more common is “Dwivedi.”

The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan, ed. Vinay Dharwadker, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 638 + xviii

This collections of academic essays has run into its eighth printing in 2014, a remarkable level of popularity for a book that is decidedly not “popular.” Ramanujan (1929-1993) is briefly introduced in two brief tributes by noted scholars (Milton Singer and Edward Dimock). Thirty of his essays follow, divided under four major themes.

The first section of six general essays on literature and culture is introduced by Wendy Doniger. Ramanujan’s profound perspective on India is summarized in the first essay in this volume:

I would like to suggest the obvious: that cultural traditions in India are indissolubly plural and often conflicting but are organized through at least two principles, (a) context-sensitivity and (b) reflexivity of various sorts, both of which constantly generate new forms out of the old ones. What we call Brahmanism, bhakti traditions, Buddhism, Jainism, tantra, tribal traditions and folklore, and lastly, modernity itself, are the most prominent of these systems. They are responses to previous and surrounding traditions, they invert, subvert, and convert their neighbours. Furthermore, each of these terms, like what we call India itself, is “a verbal tent with three-ring circuses” going on inside them. Further dialogic divisions are continuously in progress. They look like single entities, like neat little tents, only from a distance. (8)

This is repeatedly illustrated in the essays in this book which are chock full of anecdotal evidence about the complexity of Indian cultural traditions. The interaction (reflexivity) of literature and traditions is wonderfully illustrated still in this first chapter.

In the Adhyatma Ramayana (eleventh century?), as in every other Ramayana, the hero Rama is exiled. He tries to dissuade his gentle wife Sita from going with him into the dangerous forest, but Sita insists on sharing the exile and the hardships with him. When Rama continues to argue, Sita is exasperated and wins the argument by acclaiming, “Countless Ramayanas have been composed. Do you know of one where Sita does not go into the forest with Rama?” Such self-reference to other or prior examples of the narrative, often implicit, make texts like the Ramayana not merely single autonomous texts but also members of a series with a family resemblance. (21)

The second essay is a stimulating consideration of the question “Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?” Ramanujan suggests that “context sensitivity,” usually to the neglect of seeking universal principles, is definitive for Indian thought.

The second section is six essays on classical literatures, with an introduction by Vinay Dharwadker. The opening essay here is Ramanujan’s famous study of Three Hundred Ramayanas, which questions if there might actually be three thousand. This was dropped from the history syllabus in Delhi University in 2011 due to protesters complaining that it offended Hindu beliefs. Half of these essays focus on Tamil issues and are quite technical.

Six essays on bhakti and modern poetry make up the third section, introduced by John B. Carman. The first essay is on women saints, the second on men, women and saints. The introduction to the second points out that “as you know, every major group of south Indian saints has at least one woman and one untouchable among them” (279). The third essay on Siva bhakti suggests that

Virasaiva [Lingayat] poetry is about the worshipping subject, not the object of worship. Vedic hymns, Upanisadic speculations, describe god. But this bhakti poetry describes the inner movements of the speaker’s heart. Such poetry assumes Siva, agonizes over the speaker’s struggles, the stages of his snakes-and-ladders game with his god; he loves, hates, prays, suffers, and addresses it all to his god. I would hazard a guess that poets who are confident of their god, like Appar and Namalvar, describe him a great deal; and poets who concentrate on the hardships of bhakti describe their own feelings and shortcomings as if they could not help doing so. (296)

The final section is twelve essays on folklore, introduced by Stuart Blackburn and Alan Dundes. The breadth and depth of Ramanujan’s learning is clear in the first three sections of this book, but he was not merely an academic, rather was a noted poet and most notably a folklorist. The best part of the earlier sections were the many anecdotes; here the folklore takes center stage. The closing chapter of the book is “Who Needs Folklore?” and Ramanujan gives a clear answer:

For starters, I for one need folklore as an Indian studying India. It pervades by childhood, my family, my community. It is the symbolic language of the non-literate parts of me and my culture. Even in a large modern city like Bombay or Madras, even in Western-style nuclear families with their 2.2 children, folklore is only a suburb away, a cousin or a grandmother away….In a largely non-literate culture, everyone – poor, rich, high caste and low caste, professor, pundit or ignoramus – has inside him or her a large non-literate subcontinent. (532-533)

These few brief quotations and illustrations from this book barely scratch the surface of the material presented, and are introduced here in hope that readers will seek engagement with the thought of A. K. Ramanujan through these stimulating essays.