Jnana - Shashikala Srinivasan

III – Conceptual Explorations on Bhakti

By Shashikala Srinivasan | April 28, 2025May 4, 2025 by Shashikala Srinivasan

( 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…

II – Existing Scholarship on Bhakti: Casting Bhakti as Religion

By Shashikala Srinivasan | April 23, 2025May 17, 2025 by Shashikala Srinivasan

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.…