A Genealogy of Devotion

A Genealogy of Devotion: Bhakti, Tantra, Yoga and Sufism in North India, Patton Burchett has injected further nuance into the persisting popular and scholarly narrative that devotional religiosity spread throughout India by way of a unified "bhakti movement."Utilizing historical and text-critical approaches, in addition to a wealth of secondary sources, Burchett argues that the ostensibly discrete categories of tantric, yogic, and Islamic religiosity are all imbricated in the historical formations of North Indian bhakti.In the process, he advocates for bhakti movements in the plural, suggesting that "we would be better served to imagine that at different times, each of the various regions of India had its own distinctive, multivocal bhakti movement shaped by regionally and historically specific social, political, and cultural factors" (2).Burchett characterizes the early modern North Indian devotional movement as the growth of a "transregional, transsectarian bhakti sensibifity" united by similar aesthetic tastes, a common moral sense, and shared valuation of emotional expression (17).This sensibifity was heavily influenced by the Sufism of the Sultanate and Mughal periods, so Islam plays a significant role in Burchett's historiography of North Indian bhakti, marking a major challenge to the Hindu nationalist implications of a singular "movement" (82).Burchett begins his historiographical reconfiguring of North Indian bhakti in what he calls the "Tantric Age" (600-1200 CE).In this period, tantra was mainstream, its monastic orders and

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Genealogy · Islam · Literature · Sufism · Tantra · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · History · Indian and Buddhist Studies · Indian History and Philosophy