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. The 19th century European, Indological scholarship (which largely served as a frame of reference even for Indian scholars and historians) identified bhakti to be the kernel of ‘Hindu religion’ and associated bhakti mainly with the Vaishanava tradition. While today Shaivate, devi and other traditions have been brought into the fold of bhakti, the casting of bhakti as belonging primarily to the domain of the religion remains.
Monotheism was considered as an essential property of religion. Therefore, Indologists like Grierson saw traces of monotheism in Bhakti and defined bhakti as ‘belief in’ and love for one’s personal god. This definition, as some historians like Krishna Sharma point out as early as in 1987, is the imposition of Christian, religious frame on traditional practices of bhakti. Bhakti here is seen as doctrinal and defined as the love for and belief in a personal god, leaving out an entire tradition of nirgun bhakti which necessitates no personal god for bhakti at all. Sharma thus claims that the academic scholarship has drawn its definition of bhakti by only taking saguna bhakti tradition into account, thereby refusing to see the nirguna tradition as a form of bhakti. In short, scholarship made a subset within the bhakti tradition stand in for the whole which, as Sharma points out, is clearly erroneous (Sharma 1987: 39-40).
However, despite questioning the definition of Bhakti in Indological studies, Sharma defines the nirgun tradition as bhakti towards an impersonal God, thereby unable to see Brahman or atman, a salient concept in these discussions, as anything other than God as imagined in Christianity. In this way, Sharma continues to hold certain Indological assumptions. This makes Krishna Sharma, one of the central critics of the Indological scholarship on Bhakti, closer to the Indologists than she would like to appear.
As pointed out earlier, the Orientalists/Indologists saw in bhakti the evidence of the monotheistic religion that they were looking for. They made the category mistake of identifying the terms such as bhakti, jnana, karma, moksha, as belonging to our religious life and other-worldly concerns rather than a way of living that enables one to lead a good life in this life. The Bhakti tradition was conceived as a movement of social reform within Hinduism that was similar to Protestantism’s struggle against Catholicism in Europe. In this process, bhakti was cast as a popular, vernacular, reformist movement against the Brahminical, Sanskritic, Vedic, ritualistic mode of being.
However, the above interpretation cannot hold easily. Central figures associated with bhakti came from diverse caste groups, with a substantial number of them belonging to Brahmana and other ‘higher castes’ groups as well (One can recall Chaitanya, Surdas, Tulsidas, the Acharyas – Shankara, Ramanuja, Madhava; Thyagaraja, Shyama Shastri, Muthuswami Dikshiter among others). Secondly, as mentioned earlier, we can find the term in Sanskrit texts like Bhagavad Gita and traditionally it was not opposed to rituals. Bhakti was seen as making moksha or freedom possible for those who could not follow strict, ritualistic practices.
The casting of Bhakti as a social reform movement or protest movement owes itself to Orientalist, post-colonial and Marxists readings in the academia in which the theories on bhakti, puzzlingly enough, produced diametrically opposite interpretations. Krishna Sharma’s work remains one of the most astute in identifying the contradictions in the scholarship on the bhakti tradition. She perceptively points out that some Marxists like Kosambi saw bhakti and the crystallization of it into the bhakti movement as a reflection of the medieval feudal order that encouraged the attitude of servitude in peasants. The claim is that bhakti as an attitude emphasizing sentiments of loyalty and attachment was promoted to strengthen the existing power relations in favour of the ruling class. At the same time, Marxists like Irfan Habib cast the bhakti movement as a revolt, a protest movement by the lower classes against the Brahminical upper castes/classes. Here, the assumption was that bhakti was a tool against caste oppression. So, despite similar analytic tools, we have here two contradictory readings, generating two opposite attitudes. This tells us, rather starkly, of the contradictions that beset the existing theories on bhakti.
By challenging the current academic definition of bhakti which ignores Nirguna bhakti, Sharma questions the entire ‘bhakti movement’ as a modern formulation of Indologists. By tracing the Nirguna strand of Kabir to Shankara’s Nirguna Brahman, which is further traced back to Upanishads, she questions the construction of ‘a bhakti movement.’ This identification was possible because Bhakti movement is associated with image worship or Saguna bhakti. However, she points out that Nirguna bhakti is acknowledged as the goal even in texts associated with Saguna bhakti. Hence, she concludes that bhakti is not a monolithic phenomenon and is highly plural in its manifestations and scholarship on it foists a certain commonality which does not exist.
Bhakti as a response to Islam, Sufism and Christianity?
There also exists a strand of recent scholarship that traces bhakti to the influence of Islam, in particular Sufism. This is because the ascent of Islam is often seen to correspond to the growth of the Bhakti as ‘a movement’ in the sub-continent. The scholars of this strand argue on two grounds: a) the idea of love for a personal god (including treating the god as a beloved) which is the core idea of bhakti is a distinctly Islamic sentiment. b) emotionalism, spirit of self-surrender and simplicity of faith that are central to Islam also characterized the bhakti movement.
However, as has already been pointed out, while this may be true of Saguna Bhakti, making ‘love for a personal god’ essential to bhakti, leaves out the entire tradition of nirguna bhakti. Secondly, atman and brahman which are central concepts in saguna and nirguna bhakti, cannot be translated as God at all as they often are. In fact, the equation of atman as equal to Brahman would be antithetical to the Islamic conception of divine which the Sufis adhered to. Moreover, in Saguna bhakti, there is an adherence to murtis and devotion to sacred objects that would also run counter to Islam’s insistence against idol worship.
Moreover, there is a chronological issue at stake. While the beginning of Islam is often traced to 6th century AD, the Sufis were not heard before 8th century AD or even later. Before this, from 6th century AD onwards, we have the work of the first of the nayanmars and soon after, the alvaars. The term bhakti also appears in the Bhagavad Gita, Panini sutras and the Vedas. These predate not only Islam but also Christianity, as the next section will make evident. So, while there may be some influences, one cannot see Islam or even Christianity (as some scholars like A K Ramanujan and Grierson do) as the cause for the origins of bhakti in the subcontinent.
Bhakti in Bhagavad Gita
In Indological scholarship, bhakti is often seen as a central concept of ‘Hinduism’. Its roots are often traced back to the Sanskrit verb Bhaj, that means ‘to share, to possess’ and it is seen as occupying ‘a semantic field that embraces the notions of “belonging,” “being loyal,” even “liking”’ (Hawley 2015: 5).
It has been noted that the word has a long history that can be traced back to the pre-Christian era, including the Vedas (Atharvaveda – ‘tasya te bhaktih bhaktivaan sahasyam’) and as pointed earlier, in Panini’s Ashtadyayi. However, scholars are divided if these early references to Bhakti are religious or not. Two texts are often mentioned to talk about the nature of early bhakti – Panini’s Sutras and Bhagvad Gita. Friedhelm Hardy points out that while Panini speaks of ‘bhakti to Vasudeva,’ there are also references to bhakti to ‘holders of janapadas’ or bhakti to sweets, seasons, loved places and kings. Hence, rather than using bhakti to mean ‘devotion to gods’ in the religious sense, with its connotations of ‘worshipping’ (connotations often associated with later literature), Hardy suggests that that this broad semantic range implies simply a general ‘liking’ or a ‘fondness for’, or ‘a loyalty to.’ In these usages, bhakti does not appear to be restricted to ‘religious’ bhakti and neither does it carry any strong emotional charge that appears with Krishna Bhakti associated with the alwaars later on.
In fact, Hardy notes that in these early usages, emotionalism plays a minimal role even when it is bhakti for Vasudeva. In Bhagvad Gita, bhakti finds a place but as a yoga (Chapter 12, often titled Bhakti Yoga). However, in them, Hardy finds a more ‘technical’, ‘intellectual’ dimension where the stress is on yoga as a form of ‘mental concentration.’ Drawing attention to the episode where Arjuna asks Krishna which type of yogis were better – the ones who worshipped the formless and attribute-less Brahman or those who are devoted to his personal form, Krishna responds by saying that while both paths lead to the same destination, the yogi who follows the path of bhakti is superior to other yogis. Here, Hardy understands Bhakti Yoga as one yoga among others meant to channel ‘the diffuse energies of the mind (a reference to the antahkarana comprising manas, buddhi etc) in order to make possible a state of ‘liberation’ that involves the ‘perception of atman (Hardy 2011: 25-26).’ Krishna is the proper object of such a meditation and the description bhakti presupposes the idea of yoga. Hardy notes that in these usages, none of the connotations of emotions – aesthetic, erotic, ecstasy – that are considered essential to what he classifies as emotional bhakti are present.
Hence, Hardy forwards the distinction between intellectual bhakti as embodied in early bhakti texts (associated with the Bhagwad Gita and before) and the late bhakti which took the form of emotional Krishna-bhakti that originated after 6th century AD, associated with the alwars and others. It has often been noted that while yogasutra has been seen as a canonical text of philosophy and practice of yoga in the West, Indians themselves have rarely read the yogasutra and that their understanding of the philosophy of yoga largely derives from the exemplars provided by the bhakti literature and practice.
However, it is the idea of bhakti as belonging to the realm of intense feelings and emotion that dominates much philosophical thought on it today. Let us turn to this strand of literature in the next post.
Footnotes
- Here, I make a distinction between religion and Sampradayas (or Adhyatmika Sampradayas). By religion, we refer to Semitic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. What we refer to as “Hinduism” are knowledge traditions. By collapsing these traditions with religion, we run the risk of losing several concepts which lie in the domain of knowledge, ethics, education and cognition, thereby making them unavailable for reflection. Instead, they get confined to a narrower domain of “religion”. If we wish to formulate the distinctness of Indian traditions, it is necessary to make a distinction between religion and sampradayas. For a theory of religion, see The Heathen in his Blindness by S. N Balagangadhara (1994) ↩︎
Bibliography
Balagangadhara S. N. 1994. The Heathen in His Blindness: Asia, the West, and the Dynamic of Religion. Studies in the History of Religion, Vol 64. Leiden; New York, NY: E. J. Brill.
Hardy, Friedhelm. 2001. Viraha-Bhakti: The Early History of Krsna Devotion in South India (Oxford University South Asian Studies Series). Oxford University Press, USA
Hawley, John Stratton. 2015. A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Sharma, Krishna. 1987. Bhakti and the Bhakti Movement: A New Perspective: A Study in the History of Ideas. Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers.