Shashikala Srinivasan - Shashikala Srinivasan

Two Idioms of Belonging: The Nation and the Civilization

By Shashikala Srinivasan | October 13, 2025 by Shashikala Srinivasan

We often come across two kinds of idioms being used in our everyday political life: The civilizational and the national. Both are idioms of belonging, expressing a shared world of going about. Sometimes, the two journey along together, with the civilizational idiom feeding into the idea of nation. And there are times when the two come into intense conflict. Intriguingly, both are today seen as belonging to the political right as opposed to the grammar…

On the Ethical Domain and Bhakti

By Shashikala Srinivasan | September 14, 2025September 14, 2025 by Shashikala Srinivasan

It has been noted that unlike the Greek culture which spearheaded thinking about the domain of ethics, there is an absence of terminology in India which is meant to encourage reflection on ethics. This has raised the question: How is it possible to reflect on and reason about the domain of ethics when there is an absence of words to talk to about the domain? I would like to argue that words like bhakti, atman,…

III – Conceptual Explorations on Bhakti

By Shashikala Srinivasan | April 28, 2025August 22, 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, 2025September 14, 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.…

I – On Bhakti: Loss of a concept?

By Shashikala Srinivasan | September 5, 2024April 28, 2025 by Shashikala Srinivasan

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…

Indian Classical Music and the near-absence of Harmony

By Shashikala Srinivasan | May 7, 2024October 25, 2024 by Shashikala Srinivasan

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…

Making Sense of Superstitions

By Shashikala Srinivasan | March 5, 2024April 29, 2025 by Shashikala Srinivasan

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…

The Confusion between Liberal (Arts) Education and Liberalism

By Shashikala Srinivasan | February 4, 2024April 25, 2025 by Shashikala Srinivasan

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…