( with inputs from Habil. Narahari Rao) Two Strands of Scholarship There are predominantly two strands of scholarship in the current academic milieu on the notion of bhakti. One is characterized by a sociological approach that sees bhakti as an instrument of social protest against the supposed Brahminic dominance (as we saw in the previous post), the other is characterized by a search to understand bhakti as a specific concept brought about by the Indian…
Attempts to make sense of bhakti tend to impose Western categories of interpretation. Often bhakti is collapsed with religion1 or mysticism. This mis-identification has resulted in a distorted understanding of the Bhakti tradition. It is in order, at this point, to look at the scholarship more closely. Bhakti as Protestant Religion? : A Sociological Reading We owe the casting of Bhakti as religion or as part of religion of ‘Hinduism,’ to the colonial period.…
Concept of Bhakti For those grown up in India, it appears, at least on the face of it, that the word bhakti needs no elaboration. The word is familiar to most of us and is a salient part of our lives. In our everyday conversations, we often talk about not just bhakti (as a noun) towards the gods, but also of matru bhakti, pitru-bhakti or of guru-bhakti. In music, we are told that Thyagaraja was…
A young, musically talented nephew of mine, raised a question: Why is it that Indian classical music did not explore harmony like Western music did? Even when they encountered new European instruments like harmonium and violin, the Indians made it an accompaniment to individual, vocal renderings rather than use it for exploring harmony, he observed. As far as he was concerned, moving from monophony to harmony and polyphony was a natural progression in the evolution…
Today, our everyday lives are fraught with some kind of larger intellectual conflict. This comes to the fore especially when youngsters are forced to take part in a ritual, say like a Shraadha, or a pooja. Aren’t these superstitions which any educated person should shed? Why are we being forced to perform these outdated traditions which are irrational and have no scientific basis? While it was alright to hold on to these practice two centuries…
One of the problems confronting us today is the lack of an appropriate idiom for discussing education in our times. Even our new age ‘liberal arts’ institutions that have come up all over India today do not give their students a sense of what it means to be educated in this way. One of the reasons for this is, perhaps, that our discussions on liberal (arts) education are suffused with the views of liberalism; sometimes…