The Journal of Hindu Studies 2013;6:101113 doi:10.

1093/jhs/hit028

Bhakti in Hindu Cultures

Jessica Frazier*

*Corresponding author: Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and University of Kent,
jfrazier@ochs.org.uk

In the tale of the young and beautiful goddess Bhakti she is depicted as the very
essence of vitality, both in physical appearance and, it becomes clear, in religious
life. In the Padma Pur@>a, we meet her as a young mother seeking an elixir of youth
for her aged sons Knowledge and Renunciation, so that they can be rejuvenated to
the same vigour that she herself enjoys. Interestingly, she is not a competitor to
jn@na and vair@gya, but rather a caring mother eager to be returned to a vigorous
relationship with them but Narada tells her that only bhakti can dance: her sons
have limbs that are as stiff as wood, and hair as white as a crane, and even the
whispering of UpaniXads and Gat@ into their ears will not wake them. The only
medicine that will work is the fruit of the Bh@gavata Pur@>a, which will flood them
with the medicinal juice (rasa) of prema, divine adoration. Then, we are told, they
too will dance.
For scholars, the notion of bhakti has long played the part of a missing piece in
the puzzle of Indian religious historiography, explaining how the classical philo-
sophical and ascetic heritage transformed into the forms of divinity, worship, arts,
and institutional structure that are most characteristic of popular Hindu culture
today. Yet we have become sensitive to the mysteries surrounding this word and
the many ideas and phenomena with which it has come to be associated. Above all
the mystery of bhakti has led scholars to question the very ontology of religious
history was it really a distinct movement with discrete boundaries, or do we
need a more nuanced understanding of the transformation of religious cultures in
order to comprehend it? Is it a category of identity, an attitude to god, a cultural
grammar of practice, or a particularly intense and vital tone of religious life? The
definition, history, and even the very reification of bhakti are all still in the
process of being renegotiated.

Bhakti as concept and reality

In his attempt to write a coherent historical account of bhakti, Friedhelm Hardy
reached beyond the range of both Indian religious literatures and western schol-
arship to cite E. M. Forsters evocation of bhakti in which a rather mystified
Englishman tries to decipher a song like the song of an unknown bird, which

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102 Bhakti in Hindu Cultures

turns out to be a KPX>a-gat@ (Hardy 1983, pp.12). Hardys use of this scene high-
lights the riddle that bhakti has posed to western scholarship. It was only after an
initial fascination with philosophical literature, ascetic traditions, and Vedic text
and ritual, which western research turned towards the rich world of devotional
culture. That turn opened up a vast field of resources. The Sanskrit etymology of
bhakti admits of many applications, and many more have accreted to the term
over its long history of use. This wide semantic range contributes to the scholarly
detective work that has focused on the idea.
In its most literal connotation, the word bhakti refers to the division of a whole
into subsidiary portions. Understood as a sharing, a division, or the relation of a
part or an attribute to something larger, it can evoke Ved@ntic theological debates
about difference and non-difference, or tantric notions of sharing ones self with
another. Karen Pechilis has argued that on the basis of this meaning it also con-
notes participation, paving the way for theologies of embodiment and interaction
(Pechilis 1999). Used in the sense of attachment, trust and devotion to something,
in the literal sense, bhakti evokes the theologies of salvation by grace facilitated by
worship of particular personal deities. More specifically, bhakti can also signify a
cluster of states involving attraction that transcends the desire for obtainment;
that is, affection, love, adoration and also passion but of a special, deferred, and
abstracted kind such as that found in viraha-bhakti. If we put together these
different regions of significance, and we find what Lakoff and Johnson call a
cognitive metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 2003) of sharing out portions of a
whole, which has been put to specific uses to express the sharing of (divine)
being, of selfhood, and participation in the world.
Thus like dharma or yoga, bhakti is a notion that encompasses a range of
meanings. It has gathered enough currency to become passed around across dif-
ferent traditions and appropriated in a range of forms. David Lorenzen, for in-
stance, lists the Svet@svatara UpaniXad, the Bhagavad Gat@, Deva M@h@tmya, Bh@gavata
Pur@>a, the ?4v@rs, Varasaivas, V@rkaras, followers of Vallabha, Caitanya,
R@m@nanda, K@bir, Raid@sa, Mar@b@a, and others as associated with bhakti
(Lorenzen 2004). There are good reasons for speaking of Buddhist, Jain, Sikh,
and even Mughal bhakti a style of early-modern Indian religiosity explored in
the Spring 2013 issue of the Journal of Hindu Studies. Like ripples spreading outward
from a dense pebble, bhaktis semantic richness has paved the way for continually
new applications.

Bhakti as history, narrative, and movement

Currently, the understanding of bhakti as a movement has become one of the
most controversial implications of the term. This account, shared in some form by
key Hindu texts and also by scholars such as Hardy, sees bhakti as having swelled
over centuries, rolling across India, and submerging much of the renunciatory
practice, dispassionate advaitic monism, and propitiatory ritual that preceded it.
 Jessica Frazier 103

Given a female form and a voice of her own, Bhakti-devas now well-known auto-
biographical accounts in the Pur@>as tell a miracle history of a Southern youth,
later decrepitude in the north, and a magical rejuvenation in the regions asso-
ciated with VaiX>ava worship. These historicising accounts reveal a profound self-
awareness among some of the groups that took on the religious trend. They use
the idea with a sense of a volatile past (and future), of pride in the feeling of
cultural freshness and of tradition transformed, and a need to carry along trad-
ition, rather than to abandon it however triumphal champions of the new styles
of practice, arts, and theory might feel. In their sectarian leanings, these stories
also warn us that the notion of Bhakti had already become polemicised by the
early centuries CE. While there is much here to say about the authors sense of
standing at a crucial turning point in the history of the broad intellectual culture
of the subcontinent, modern events have introduced pressing concerns about the
implications of this narrative.
John Stratton Hawley writes of seeing a mural praising R@m amid the remnants
of the Babri Mosque, inscribed with the motto R@m ka bhakti r@Xbra ka sakti hai
(Hawley 2008). Much of his work since then has born the marks of that experience.
The polemical power of the idea seems to have extended almost throughout the
course of its use, from the Gat@s defence of bhakti over renunciation and ritual
onwards. This power has sometimes been used to empower marginalised groups,
to some extent justifying its reputation as a form of protest Hinduism that cham-
pioned direct access to the presence and the gifts of the divine, an egalitarian
individualism, and the democritisation of religious reflection through the medium
of the arts and vernacular languages. But with the modern politically-motivated
appropriation of bhakti as an intrinsically Hindu phenomenon, the power of the
bhakti idea has also been used to elide the influence of Buddhist, Jain, and Islamic
culture, alienating other religions from their participation in the landscapes and
identity of India. Opposing this rewriting of history, scholars have more recently
sought to relate the historical narrative that bhakti tells about itself to the actual
conditions of its flourishing.
A significant proportion of research on bhakti traditions in the past five years
has been devoted to contextualising them against the backdrop of different
regions and languages, social, sectarian, and religious divisions, relations of pa-
tronage or of competition, and very diverse cultural influences. This increasingly
pluralistic approach has helped to counter its reification, while the Hindu-isa-
tion of bhakti is also being challenged by work on Indian Islamic devotion to
Sufi saints and pirs, the nirgu>a bhakti of syncretic thinkers such as Kabir, as well
as the bhakti devoted to Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, Tarthankaras and other not
quite divine figures who stand outside the bounds of what is normally called
Hinduism. Of particular interest have been the social conditions that
polemicised bhakti into an exclusive term of identity. In the publications of
the past five years alone, we have gained a significantly better picture of the
ways in which the history and concept of bhakti were affected by inter-sectarian
104 Bhakti in Hindu Cultures

competition (Stewart 2010), the hagiographic imagining of generations of fol-

lowers (Hawley 2012), changing conventions in arts, intellectual culture and the
demands of patronage (Busch 2011), the reception of the bhakti public both in
the periods of composition (Novetzke 2007) and in subsequent generations
(Manring 2005), and also the desire to develop an umbrella category that
would unite the diverse philosophical perspectives, deity-affiliations, and re-
gional communities of India (Nicholson 2010).
More broadly, work has been done to fill out our picture of the influence of
courtly culture, administrative and mercantile changes in empire and kingdom,
reactions to increased mobility and the in- and out-flux of immigrants and emi-
grants, the changing sense of territory and pilgrimages place in laying claim to it,
new forms of social subversion and cultural exchange, developments in the social,
political, and natural sciences, forms and styles of literary composition, and other
structural features of the contemporary world, all of which provided social infra-
structures that supported the complex yet strikingly coherent traditions of devo-
tion, allowing them to flourish over time. Yet it is important to apply such
historical insights with clarity: religious ideas and actions can rarely be explained
solely by reference to political interests. The unravelling of bhakti into its con-
stituent strands does not make it disappear; it merely reveals some of the intel-
lectual and cultural threads that constitute it.

Bhakti as experience, yoga, and emotion

The Virasaiva poet Basavanna writes of bhakti as a kind of experience one in
which the quality of emotional intensity predominates, even to the point of pain:

Dont you take on

this thing called bhakti:
like a saw
it cuts when it goes
and it cuts again
when it comes. (trans. Ramanujan 1973, p.79)

Hardys study of bhakti begins by describing the distinctive character of bhakti

experience. Drawing largely on VaiX>ava contexts and particularly on the ecstatic
Bengali figure of Caitanya, he paints a picture of Hindu devotion as an all-
absorbing religious passion (Hardy 1983, p.4) that takes place at the personal,
experiential, or the mystical, level (Hardy 1983, p.8), and is subsequently transfig-
ured into poetry and myth.
Hardys analysis has been influential on later approaches; other scholars have
worked at the coal-face of texts and practices to excavate the intense experi-
ences at the core of the bhakti phenomenon. Norman Cutlers Songs of Experience
(1987), published the year after Edward Bruners The Anthropology of Experience
 Jessica Frazier 105

pressed home the importance of looking to the experience behind the cultural
form, interpreted ?4v@r poetry in terms of its effect on the devotees sense of
identity. He or she experiences a poet-god-audience triangle that allows all
devotees to become saints (Cutler 1987, p.47). David Habermans studies of
both bhakti pilgrimages (1994) and bhakti narratives (1988) show that the scho-
lar must be able to register the imaginal events and landscape of Krishnas
village home, invisible to the untrained eye, in order to understand the context
that gives those practices their meaning; and elsewhere he points out that no
ritual or scriptural practice is adequate unless they produce an independent
inner attitude of desire (lobha) for greater encounter with KPX>a (Haberman
1994, p.66). Frederick Smith reminds us that possession often functioned as a
way of charting the shifts of those inner states such as bh@va, and particularly of
the extreme ecstatic experiences of saints such as Caitanya and later
Ramakrishna experiences that were also crucial in establishing their authority
(Smith 2007). In later periods, the hagiographic narratives that still give shape to
much of modern Hindu identity, have also functioned as biographical narratives
of bhakti experience. The ecstasies of Caitanya, the rigours of a Swaminarayan,
the visions of Antal or Karraikal all provide a touchstone that legitimates and
guides the samprad@ya forward through history.
This notion of bhakti as a phenomenon rooted in powerful subjective experience
accords well with the Bh@gavata Mah@tmyas idea that it is a hidden source of health
and vitality; the Bh@gavata Pur@>a tells us that without bhakti the world becomes so
purposeless, unpoetic, and emotionally dead, that ears that do not listen to the
exploits of ViX>u are mere holes . . . A head . . . is a mere burden . . . Hands . . . are
the hands of a corpse . . . A heart . . . is a heart of stone. (2.3.2023). Frederick
Smith has linked bhakti to the broader category of religious experience, defining
it as loving engagement with the object of ones religious practice . . . a natural
part of every religion and every deeply felt religious or spiritual act (Smith 1998,
pp.1719). Smiths claim that the devotional sentiment is found in Sanskrit texts
of all ages suggests that bhakti as the vivifying experiential substrate of practice
cannot confined to specific uses, or pinned to any specific periods, regions, or
genres of practice.

Yogic bhakti

The renunciatory, inward-facing, dispassionate practice of yoga is sometimes seen

as a diametrically opposed state to the communal, sense-rich, passionate practice
of popular bhakti, and that the former was forced into a marginal position in
Hindu society by the emergence of the latter. Bhakti texts and thinkers sometimes
depicted the limitations of merely ascetic, yogic, ved@ntic, or logical approaches to
the divine an axis of comparison of which there are still signs in Brahmo-Samaj-
influenced thinkers such as Tagore who, in his novel The Home and the World,
106 Bhakti in Hindu Cultures

depicted a nationalist bhakti that was in contrast to dry logic (preferring, in this
case, the latter).
But of course the dichotomisation of yogic dispassion and ascetic lifestyle from
theistic devotion is ill-grounded; many contemporary Hindu renunciants are in
fact Siva bhaktas, and yoga as a discipline of controlling and harnessing the
mental-physical self has come to be applied to all sorts of goals. In text too, the
two traditions have a relationship of complementarity, and even of identity. If
the yoga that we see in the Yoga S+tra and Yoga UpaniXads is above all the analysis,
control, and harnessing of mental states, then certain traditions of bhakti are a
continuation of that project, providing a theory of the emotional modifications of
the mind (and heart) in the bhakti rasas, as well as a practical method for con-
trolling and cultivating emotion through the use of devotional arts, s@dhan@ rou-
tines of an up-building character, and the inspiration of an exemplar present in
the figure of the saint who lives constantly in the elevated state of absorption and
one-pointed focus on the divine.
Thus, Bhakti appears not as a competitor to yoga, but as its heir. In the Bhagavad
Gat@ bhakti is the new yoga, and dispassionate social-embeddedness the new re-
nunciation. In the Pur@>as, both P@rvata and the Gopas are envied by on-looking
ascetics for the focus and fortitude that their love effortlessly imparts to them. The
lovesick R@dh@ is depicted by R+pa Gosv@ma as a master ascetic, braving the fires
of suffering and following KPX>a in sam@dhi on the eye [i.e. possession]-path of the
ascetics (yamin@: netra-padivam, in Ha:sad+ta 87). The focus on subjectivity that
we see in yogas inward turn, was instrumental in paving the way for the new
sculpting of self in devotional theology, arts and practice.
If the monarchic protection of R@ma, the maternal protection of Durg@, the
auspicious marriage of ViX>u and LakXma, and the village relationships of KPX>a,
seem to be a far cry from the lifestyles associated with yogic practice, then other
varieties of devotional experience, such as guru bhakti help to bridge the gap.
Indeed, the guru-siXya relationship may be one of the original templates for the
intimate sharing that takes place in bhakti. The reference to bhakti in the
Svet@svatara UpaniXad could be seen as conflating devotion to god with that dir-
ected to the guru (Pechilis 2011, p.109), and the Netra Tantra tells us that the
processes that the guru undertakes for benefit of the disciple are a catalogue of
the effects that one might hope for from devotion to a deity these include
processes of transforming the body of the disciple into an immortal subtle
body, entering him through yogic possession, yoking him to himself, and liquefy-
ing the inner organ (anta$kara>a) of selfhood and drawing it into his own self,
potentially for the purposes of causing him to reach the most excellent abode
(White 2009, p.72). As Brahman or `svara may be likened in Ved@nta to the sun
pervading the world with its rays, so too the yogi is a sun that reaches out its rays
into his disciples, illustrating the kinds of sharing and participation that a
bhakta can hope to experience.
 Jessica Frazier 107

Emotional bhakti
Strikingly intense and intimate emotion forms the distinctive characteristic in
Hardys account, and the prolific publication of bhakti literatures in the past
thirty years has provided a rich context in which to explore the contours of
that emotion. Nancy Martin defines bhakti in terms of a complex and multi-
dimensional relationship between human and divine, including adoration but
also partaking of every form of love possible between human beings, from parental
love to that of lovers (Martin 2003, p.183). Bhakti rarely prefers love in its most
simple and unproblematic forms, and scholars of the Sakta and Saiva bhakti trad-
itions, such as June McDaniel and Karen Pechilis, have helped to extend our
understanding of the palette of bhakti emotions. McDaniel has highlighted the
emotion of comfort in maternal protection, and also fear at the power and au-
thority of Kali as creatrix (McDaniel 2004). In the present issue, Karen Pechilis has
helped to show how the emotion of love can be blended in a captivating mixture
with awe-ful horror in worship of Sivas cremation-ground tantric form. Hanuman
is the widely worshipped recipient of enthusiastically heroic emotions, a deity
who opens the heart and shows submission through courageous action
(Lutgendorf 2007). Devotion to Murugan calls forth a bhakti of appreciating his
martial vigour, while devotion to the BalakPX>a form of KPX>a involves a bhakti of
being irresistibly charmed in the face of naughtiness. Other gods call forth further
emotions, positive and negative, dynamic and even serene; the Kashmiri scholar
Abhinavagupta provides a characterisation of the yogic, renunciatory realisation
of Siva as an emotion of santi or peace, provoking us to wonder whether even the
subjective experience of dispassionate calm and lucidity can also be a form of
bhakti experience.
Yet in the more impassioned forms of devotional emotion, we see the pro-
nounced mark of bhaktis tantric and siddha-yogic heritage. The emotion of
k@ma (love) in the Gat@govinda, that a willing bhakta must allow to slip in to his
or her mind through the softening influence of Jayadevas poetry, is the same god
K@ma who tries to invade (i.e. possess) Siva in the Pur@>as, only to be yogically
destroyed by that master of all spirits. The work of Frederick Smith and David
Gordon White has helped to bring to light ways in which possession forms a
pervasive part of the Hindu world-view, and June McDaniel has helped to apply
those insights in the context of popular devotion, adding contemporary ethnogra-
phies that alert us to the special meeting of possession and passion in Bengals
tantric-bhakti blends (McDaniel 1989). Emotion is frequently seen as a kind of
possession, and like a tantric possession, it can transform and divinise us, elevating
us into the subtle body through which we are able to interact more freely with
God.
This tantric notion of the devotional passions may seem at odds with the elegant
theorisation of bhakti in the aesthetic tradition. There we see a patient, gradual
cultivation of persistent practice, building systematically on religious habitus,
108 Bhakti in Hindu Cultures

transitory emotions, permanent moods, and eventually mah@bh@va, all of which

seems to be a far cry from the volatile possessions of a medium. Indeed, one of the
purposes of such meticulous texts as the Bhaktiras@mPtasindhu may have been to
differentiate bhakti as a life-long state of living, from more capricious episodes of
ecstasy, and McDaniel has shown that this remains a concern for modern Bengali
bhaktas (McDaniel 2012). But the connections remain, and tantra has been ingeni-
ously woven together with the dramaturgy of the classical aesthetic tradition; one
cannot fail to notice that the outward signs of blushing, shaking, sweating, weep-
ing, eyes darting about, etc. by which an actor signals emotion to an audience, are
the same signs that signal possession and also some of the same theatrical marks
of emotion that make early Hindi cinema so melodramatic to foreign eyes! The
inter-weaving of the two threads of devotion and possession has contributed to
one of the bhakti traditions most interesting features: its extraordinarily detailed
phenomenology of the types, stages and signs of emotion.
The exaltation of bhakti by thinkers like R+pa Gosv@ma prompts us to reconsider
the nature of emotion itself. R+pa tells us that above the five main forms of mokXa
(co-residence in same world, equality in power, proximity, similarity in form, or
even union), seva, equated with bhakti yoga, is said to be the highest, making all
normal kinds of mokXa appear light in contrast (Bhaktiras@mPtasindhu 1.1.13 and
34). Seva here, is surely not only ritual service to the deity rather it is a sort of
yoga, a harnessing of oneself to a specific goal with complete focus and devotion.
This is no mere affect; Lutjeharms has argued that bhakti was considered to be a
pram@>a, a direct encounter with the divine object. There are ontological issues at
stake here, as in bhakti emotion we come into contact not with a contingent state
of mind, but with a major force in the universe, a key ingredient of reality, that
cannot otherwise be fully known than via the long, difficult, many-tiered ladder of
emotion.

Bhakti as body, sense, world, and divinity

While the subjective dimension of bhakti is central to its self-understanding, it
reverses the modern western template for mystical or ecstatic experiences.
Emotion, in bhakti traditions, rarely stands alone as an isolated sudden and other-
worldly experience of the kind that fascinated the William Jameses and Evelyn
Underhills of the west. Bhakti experiences tend to be strongly embedded in a
narrative context and are replete with sensory content. Most bhakti-based notions
of mokXa, unlike the pure consciousness of S@:khya kaivalya, or the un-worldly
consciousness sought in many forms of Advaita, aim for existence in a world of
selves, forms, bodies, and relationships. This world-affirming tendency is a topic
of fascination in contemporary scholarship on bhakti, reflecting broader orienta-
tions in religious studies and phenomenology.
Many such traditions are well grounded in two millennia of philosophical debate
about the status of the perceived world in relation to the divine. The UpaniXads
 Jessica Frazier 109

contain images of divine transformation (e.g. gold into ornaments in Ch@>nogya

UpaniXad 6.2 or food into the different forms of those it nourishes in
Taittiraya UpaniXad 3.9), of divine partition (as of space into separate containers
in K@bha UpaniXad 2.10 and Ch@>nogya UpaniXad 3.12), and of divine emanation (e.g.
threads from a spider, plants from the earth, hair from a head in Mu>naka UpaniXad
1.7), Hindu debate about the implications of such passages questioned whether the
world should be affirmed and in what way as a transformation of divinity, or one
manifestation of its capacities, or an intended creation of god with intrinsic value
and purpose.
Theologians who were strongly associated with medieval and early modern
bhakti take a philosophically informed stand on the issue: R@m@nuja, for instance,
argues that the world is gods body in the sense of being a medium of divine action
(prak@ra), while, for Caitanya VaiX>avas, phenomenal reality is the very activity of
the divine, a medium for generating the bliss that is the essence of KPX>a. This
debate was also engaged in Sakta and Saiva Tantric texts; at one end of the spec-
trum the Netra Tantra depicts an intimate and laudatory relationship between god
and goddess or guru and pupil, while praising the great eye of Siva as a source of
the whole universe. At the other end of the spectrum, the Vijn@na Bhairava Tantra
notes that transcendence (paratva) cannot exist alongside colour, sound and form,
and that the true nature of the divine is beyond the world. In many traditions
bhakti took the form not of a single movement, but of a circuit of dynamic debates
circling around questions of the divine nature, and the possibilities of a relation-
ship with that nature, for centuries.
While relatively few Hindus have ever read the UpaniXads, Tantras, or scholastic
writings of Ved@nta, bhakti served as the arena for such religious doctrines at the
popular level, often expressing them through image and myth: the idea of a par-
ticipatory or shared divinity, partially embodied in the universe, is illustrated in
the image of KXP>a revealing his many-headed, many-mouthed Visva-r+pa form
which contains all gods and beings, in the Bhagavad Gat@, or the image of the
endless Siva-linga: transfixing the universe, illustrates for everyday people that
subtle scholastic virtue of infinity that elevates bhakti gods over the broader
pantheon of deities.
The very expression of bhakti genres in narrative and poetry added a new
dimension, affirming the situatedness of sense-perception, relationship and plot.
Bhakti experience became incarnate in a body of words, giving new life to litera-
tures that became touchstones of emotion, sources of grace, and objects of devo-
tion. Through the reading of many texts, as Vasudha Narayanan says of ?4v@r
poetry, devotion becomes manifest, tangible, the words become fragrant, like a
garland. (Narayanan 2007, p.228). Bhakti literatures enact theology by shaping the
experience of the devotee thus, for instance Wulff describes the Gat@govinda as a
kind of temple, following a rhythmic disposition towards a point of intense
concentration (Wulff 1984, p.13). Similarly, Norman Cutler describes Tamil
110 Bhakti in Hindu Cultures

bhakti literatures as a transformation of the devotee through a series of identi-

fications that lead to a form of divine union:

. . . as the phalasruti verses plainly affirm, the poems of the saints have direct
consequences for their audience, consequences that are not confined to poetic
effect . . . The poet identifies with the god he worships; the audience identifies
with the poet, who is, above all, a model worshiper. And by following the saints
example, the audience finally identifies with the god. (Cutler 1987, p.37)

In such ways, Bhakti can function not only as a style, or a state, but as a process of
creating participation, remaking the self into part of a shared whole.
The use of form and affirmation of the senses can employ concrete media as well
as verbal ones. The smells, sounds, colours, textures, and tastes evoked in poetry,
are can be reinforced at any time by a visit to the temple where the direct glance
of the deity, the scent of incense, the colours of adornment in the temple and
sensation of substances, as well as the sensitivity to landscape cultivated by pil-
grimage. Dennis Hudson did much to show the ways in which temples served not
only as manifestations of political power to devotees, but also as concrete theol-
ogies, designed and painted to seize their six senses of touch, taste, sight, hearing,
smell and thought, and then focus them on Deva or God, who is the subject of
every spoken word and material form (Hudson 2008, p.6). These data-rich recon-
structions of the sensory world are characteristic of bhakti genres, activating the
imagination as a receptive organ of awareness.
Importantly, the bhakti-body can as well be made of thought, as of flesh. It is
with the thought-sense-agency body of the self (rather than the merely biological
one) that the devotee takes the dark limbs of KPX>a and K@la into his or her mind,
or is touched by the possession of a deity. Even in devotional acting (Haberman
1988) the imaginations virtual reality becomes as vital as the material one. The
bhakti uses of the d+ta-k@vya genre of literature drive this home: in R+pa Gosv@mas
Ha:sad+ta the whole journey through landscapes marked by memories of KPX>a is
an imagined one, but it is precisely at this level that we can see him in those the
hills and forests, and it is also at this level that his estranged lover R@dh@ will be
able to welcome him at her side once again, even though he will never return. It is
perhaps important to remember that the material body was but one, and perhaps
the least, of many bodies in Indian culture (Wujastyk 2009), and that imaginal,
subtle, and action-bodies offered other forms of embodiment or alternatively of
en-sensement, en-emotionment, and en-narrativement.

Four perspectives on Bhakti

In the present issue, Karen Pechilis explores the writings of Karraik@l Ammaiy@r,
revealing devotional tropes with which those who have focused on the VaiX>ava
pur@>as will be less familiar cremation grounds instead of blossoming forests, a
 Jessica Frazier 111

demon coven instead of village hotbed of gossip, and the wild dance of the ascetic
Siva instead of the erotic-play of the ornamented lover KPX>a. Pechilis explores the
history behind the image of Siva as dancer, tracing what we now know as the
Nabar@ja image through from puranic textual accounts of Sivas cremation ground
dance, to Karaikk@l Ammaiy@rs mid first millennium poetry, through tenth-
century Chola images, to Ananda Coomaraswamys exhibition-catalogue essay
Dance of the Divine. She shows how the liminal and challenging world of
demons, cremation grounds, and the edge of the universe provided a powerful
setting for the bhakti imagination, and also for the devotional subject as one who
feels empowered to bring himself or herself into the divine story, and to do so in a
more than merely visual way: Karaikk@ls devotional subjectivity is fully embodied
as a demon in the divine world of the cremation ground.
Jack Hawleys article relocates bhakti firmly in its geographical, political, and
historical setting, exemplifying the method of doing history from the bottom-up
by reconstructing the lived framework that informed Gaudiya thought. In this
case, that framework is the reality of sectarian flourishing from Jaipur, through
Brindavan, across to Puri, in organic ways that then had to be integrated into the
neat categorial four-samprad@ya scheme, seeking to place current movements
within the traditional lineages of R@m@nuja, Nimb@rka, Madhva, or ViX>usw@ma.
We are reminded that the geographical descriptions in Bhakti texts, which so
often, as echoes of timeless and heavenly realities, hide their historicity in a
veil of otherworldly interpretation, actually tell us about real people in real
places. Hawley argues that Jaisingh inspired a Gaunaya (and possibly pan-
VaiX>ava) attempt to fit into the established categorisations that could give
legitimacy.
Barbara Holdreges article provides an illuminating account of the integral com-
bination of theology, metaphysics, practice, and poetics that is seen in the Gaunaya
VaiXnava tradition. Her analysis highlights the important conceptual differences
that distinguish that school from other Bh@gavata Pur@>a-inspired Ved@ntic sam-
prad@yas, drawing away from the tendency to conflate the theologies of the
VPnd@vana thinkers. Holdreges article shows us an early modern theology in
full flower, creatively at work defending key aspects of their bhakti religiosity
from competing Yogic and Advaitic values. The importance of the body to
Gaunayas is a crucial feature of Holdreges exposition; polemically positioning
their account in contrast to the body-soul dichotomies found in other contempor-
ary schools, they invest different terms with new meaning, ultimately creating an
innovative metaphysics of embodied form by which to superordinate the various
shades of gross and material body with their own non-material devotional self.
Finally, Jessica Birkenholtz brings a hidden deity to light, setting the Nepali
goddess Svasth@na beside those Sanskritic pan-Indian deities who receive the
majority of scholarly attention. Her article offers an illuminating window onto
the bhakti that takes place at the local level focusing on regional deities, she
also shows us the difficulties that a goddess must face in fitting in to the clan
112 Bhakti in Hindu Cultures

of pan-Indian gods through processes of assimilation or familial connections.

Above all, Birkenholtzs detailed investigation into the many places and ways in
which Svasth@na appears, gives us a concrete case study for the profound com-
plexity, fluidity, and context dependence that qualifies the significance of all
Hindu deities, and particularly those whose somewhat marginal status means
they must be adaptable.
These articles show us both canonical bhakti groups, and more unusual and
under-represented cases. Importantly, they describe both the historical form that
bhakti cultures took and also the doctrinal content that distinguished them. We
see devotional subjectivity taking on different kinds of embodiment, and we also
see the way in which devotional identities were martialled into the pre-formed
shapes that tradition had arranged for them. Rather than a single movement, in
these views we see bhakti as a creative point of transition through which the
complex and elusive dimension of devotion took birth again and again in ever-
new historical bodies, breathing new life into each even as the new form grew old
and the next transformation began. Perhaps then it is not the historical sense of
the word movement that is needed here, but rather the literal one whatever
caution we employ in the use of such a weighted word, we can certainly say that
bhakti was a ceaseless movement of ideas through the many landscapes of Hindu
history.

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