A Genealogy of Devotion

A Genealogy of Devotion
Author: Patton E. Burchett
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 468
Release: 2019-05-28
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0231548834

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.

Routledge Handbook of South Asian Religions

Routledge Handbook of South Asian Religions
Author: Knut A. Jacobsen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 471
Release: 2020-11-29
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0429622066

The Routledge Handbook of South Asian Religions presents critical research, overviews, and case studies on religion in historical South Asia, in the seven nation states of contemporary South Asia: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives, and in the South Asian diaspora. Chapters by an international set of experts analyse formative developments, roots, changes and transformations, religious practices and ideas, identities, relations, territorialisation, and globalisation in historical and contemporary South Asia. The Handbook is divided into two parts which first analyse historical South Asian religions and their developments and second contemporary South Asia religions that are influenced by both religious pluralism and their close connection to nation states and their ideological power. Contributors argue that religion has been used as a tool for creating nations as well as majorities within those nations in South Asia, despite their enormous diversity, in particular religious diversity. The Handbook explores these diversities and tensions, historical developments, and the present situation across religious traditions by utilising an array of approaches and from the point of view of various academic disciplines. Drawing together a remarkable collection of leading and emerging scholars, this handbook is an invaluable research tool and will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of Asian religion, religion in context, and South Asian religions.

Bhakti Religion in North India

Bhakti Religion in North India
Author: David N. Lorenzen
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 1994-11-09
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780791420263

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.

A History of State and Religion in India

A History of State and Religion in India
Author: Ian Copland
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2013-05-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1136459502

Offering the first long-duration analysis of the relationship between the state and religion in South Asia, this book looks at the nature and origins of Indian secularism. It interrogates the proposition that communalism in India is wholly a product of colonial policy and modernisation, questions whether the Indian state has generally been a benign, or disruptive, influence on public religious life, and evaluates the claim that the region has spawned a culture of practical toleration. The book is structured around six key arenas of interaction between state and religion: cow worship and sacrifice, control of temples and shrines, religious festivals and processions, proselytising and conversion, communal riots, and religious teaching/doctrine and family law. It offers a challenging argument about the role of the state in religious life in a historical continuum, and identifies points of similarity and contrast between periods and regimes. The book makes a significant contribution to the literature on South Asian History and Religion.

Between Muslim P?r and Hindu Saint

Between Muslim P?r and Hindu Saint
Author: Mukesh Kumar
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2024-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1009424033

This book explores the changing form of religious culture in the Mewat region of north India.

Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India

Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India
Author: Tyler Williams
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 601
Release: 2018-01-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199091676

Early modern India—a period extending from the fifteenth to the late eighteenth century—saw dramatic cultural, religious, and political changes as it went from Sultanate to Mughal to early colonial rule. Witness to the rise of multiple literary and devotional traditions, this period was characterized by immense political energy and cultural vibrancy. Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India brings together recent scholarship on the languages, literatures, and religious traditions of northern India. It focuses on the rise of vernacular languages as vehicles for literary expression and historical and religious self-assertion, and particularly attends to ways in which these regional spoken languages connect with each other and their cosmopolitan counterparts. Hindu, Muslim, and Jain idioms emerge in new ways, and the effect of the volume as a whole is to show that they belong to a single complex cultural conversation.

Shiptown

Shiptown
Author: Ann Grodzins Gold
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2017-06-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0812249259

Ann Grodzins Gold weaves together an integrated series of ethnographic sketches depicting the distinctive nature of non-urban, non-rural places; the impact locality has on belonging; the negotiations of difference required in a pluralistic society; and the ways a changing environment permeates experiences of self and place.