A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement

by John Stratton Hawley

India celebrates itself as a nation of unity in diversity, but where does that sense of unity come from? One important source is a widely-accepted narrative called the “bhakti movement.” Bhakti is the religion of the heart, of song, of common participation, of inner peace, of anguished protest. The idea known as the bhakti movement asserts that between 600 and 1600 CE, poet-saints sang bhakti from India’s southernmost tip to its northern Himalayan heights, laying the religious bedrock upon which the modern state of India would be built.

Challenging this canonical narrative, John Stratton Hawley clarifies the historical and political contingencies that gave birth to the concept of the bhakti movement. Starting with the Mughals and their Kachvaha allies, North Indian groups looked to the Hindu South as a resource that would give religious and linguistic depth to their own collective history. Only in the early twentieth century did the idea of a bhakti “movement” crystallize―in the intellectual circle surrounding Rabindranath Tagore in Bengal. Interactions between Hindus and Muslims, between the sexes, between proud regional cultures, and between upper castes and Dalits are crucially embedded in the narrative, making it a powerful political resource.

A Storm of Songs ponders the destiny of the idea of the bhakti movement in a globalizing India. If bhakti is the beating heart of India, this is the story of how it was implanted there―and whether it can survive.

Genres: India, Religion

464 pages, Hardcover

First published March 9, 2015

About the author

John Stratton Hawley is Professor of Religion at Barnard College, Columbia University.

Reviews

[Abhishek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hawley contests the idea of a Bhakti “movement” . There was an outpouring of devotional literature in the late medieval - early modern India, but the narrative of a movement, a fire starting with the Alwars and Nayanmars in the south in the middle of the first millennium spreading to the north till it encompasses the whole country is just that, a narrative. The Bhakti movement idea meant - and means - many things to many people, based on their caste affiliation, their community, their region, language and faith. It cannot be a movement because there was no well considered goal, nor a people’s agenda. Hawley's thesis is that the idea of a movement to describe what happened originated during the independence movement at Tagore’s Shantiniketan. One reason for this is Hazaripradas Dvivedi’s and others reading of Nabhadas’ Bhatkal, composed in the 16th century, and accepting it at face value. Bhatkamal proposes a sampradaya for each for different 800 different bhaktas it describes, and each of the sampradayas has a southern origin - Ramanuja, or Madhava, or Visnuswami. Hawley suggests this is the reason for the south-north journey of bhakti in common imagination. He finds no evidence for this southern origin, and contends that the popularity of the sampradaya model of northern Bhakti is itself of early modern origin, thanks to the attempts of a Sawai Jai Singh to homologize the public religious culture of 18th century Jaipur. Before that, Mughal rule, ironically, led to the explosion of distinct Hindu communities in the north around the 15th and 16th centuries, thanks to improvement in trade routes, guilds and road networks.

By now it should be evident that Bhakti movement described in this book is a purely northern (and eastern) affair, even though it claims a southern origin. There’s no mention of any of the Virasaivas - Basavanna, Allama Prabhu - or any other southern expressions of Bhakti, including that of the Alvars and Annamayya in the anthologies and hagiographies produced in the north till the early 20th century. If there’s no movement, how does one describe the explosion of the devotional literature that heralded the 15th and 16th and thence? Hawley prefers to call it a network, in part to displace the notion that the individual bhaktas - Surdas, Kabir, Tulsidas, Chaitanya - are the engines of history, and instead focus on the acts of collective authorship, a construction of collective memory. This makes sense in a way, since it seems like many people composed in the name of the historical Kabir and Surdas. When one speaks of Kabir's dohe, what one is speaking of is the community that ended up producing the songs in his name and in his style. So a network, not a movement, but plenty of movement within the network. Genres and tropes are shared. For example, the bhaktas meet in the hagiographies - Mira goes in search of Kabir and Ravidas, Ravidas in search of Kabir, Namdev is a friend of Cokhamela. In Tamil, there’s the story of how Alvars became Alvars in the first place: three of them took refuge from a torrential downpour in a hut. With three there was no place to sleep or rest, so they sing the night away. If there was a flow in a direction, it’s probably from north to south as the Marathas make court in Tanjavur. That has its documented effect on Carnatic music, for example.

How curious that the south was an ideal in the northern mind in the 15th century. How curious that the Bhakti bhajans of the north are decisively Vaisnavite in character. How did Nabhadas get the idea of Ramanuja? And if he did, Ramanuja from the south as a signifier of prestige was already available for him. How did the idea of Ramanuja make that journey from Srirangam? While Hawley interrogates all the narratives available to us that answer some of these questions, he is unable to provide any convincing alternatives. His reframing of the bhakti movement as a bhakti network is also a tad pedantic - all I could think of during the denouement was, “so what?”. He also, like many other historians of Medieval India, has his eyes firmly on the current political landscape. While he spends a considerable amount of time on Vrindavan and the building of the Keshavadeva temple, he nimbly skips any mention of its eventual destruction. Reading this text one would assume that the original temple was still standing. At the same time he doesn’t show as much reticence when talking about current zeitgeist and the events in India over the past few decades. That aside, I enjoyed this exploration of the late medieval north, one that is not focused on king and empire.

[Prabir Das · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not as enlightening as I expected it to be. Perhaps being an Indian, I was aware of most of the contents that the author took so sincere interest in to learn and to write.

[Revanth Ukkalam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is not an anthology of Bhakti work. There are infinite places that do that, including this author's other works. Instead, as the cover says, it's on the "idea of Bhakti". How has Bhakti been understood and theorised? Where do we find a principle of the 'Bhakti Movement'? For the most part, Hawley deals with Vaishnavism (or replaceably, Krishna-Bhakti) and fits so many pieces together from the mid 20th century back to the time of Akbar. Doing so, he engages with the idea that a Bhakti as a systemised unit was a modern/colonial invention - and sternly sets that aside. There indeed have been former attempts to organise Bhakti, but maybe not as a movement. Somehow the idea always begins with Alvars in South India flows through Sri Ramanuja and settles in Vrindavan in the Braj Mandal where it blossoms to the tunes of Krishna and the rhythm of the dancing Gopis. One reason for the latter choice was of course that Braj Mandal was the site of this paradigm building - because of finding itself to be a seat of the two most popular Bhakti traditions of North India, Vallabha's Pushtimarga and Krishna Chaitanya's Gaudiya Sampradaya. It is just absolutely stunning to see how in the eyes of one of the designers of the 'Bhakti paradigm' if I could call it that, both Nanak and Kabir descend as spores from the muzzle of Ramanuja in the Tamil Country. What audacity! Now on to the writing - the author is excellent in not being too indulgent. Whenever I was startled it was because the book did not urge me to do the same, however the unpredictabilities and dramatic moments which may miss the eye, the author definitely points the cursor too. I was again, I must add, slightly disappointed with the book's choice to situate itself in the 'Did India have the Early Modern?' debate. Unnecessary. Finally, there are several books to be read by Hawley. I wonder what this very sensitive and empathetic sweetheart have to say about 'Vrindavan in the 21st century'...

[A. B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book, stopped at page 200/350. What I read was enlightening.