We are used to thinking of bhakti as devotion to a personal God. This understanding of bhakti almost entirely determines how we discuss the concept today. That there are other ways as well in which the Indian tradition explores and discusses the concept does not occur to us. Hence, those accustomed to the contemporary associations of bhakti, are likely to be taken aback by a startlingly different understanding of bhakti in one of the central…
( 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…