A Genealogy of Devotion: Bhakti, Tantra, Yoga, and Sufism in North India

by Patton E. Burchett

In this book, Patton E. Burchett offers a path-breaking genealogical study of devotional (bhakti) Hinduism that traces its understudied historical relationships with tantra, yoga, and Sufism. Beginning in India's early medieval "Tantric Age" and reaching to the present day, Burchett focuses his analysis on the crucial shifts of the early modern period, when the rise of bhakti communities in North India transformed the religious landscape in ways that would profoundly affect the shape of modern-day Hinduism.

A Genealogy of Devotion illuminates the complex historical factors at play in the growth of bhakti in Sultanate and Mughal India through its pivotal interactions with Indic and Persianate traditions of asceticism, monasticism, politics, and literature. Shedding new light on the importance of Persian culture and popular Sufism in the history of devotional Hinduism, Burchett's work explores the cultural encounters that reshaped early modern North Indian communities. Focusing on the Rāmānandī bhakti community and the tantric Nāth yogīs, Burchett describes the emergence of a new and Sufi-inflected devotional sensibility--an ethical, emotional, and aesthetic disposition--that was often critical of tantric and yogic religiosity. Early modern North Indian devotional critiques of tantric religiosity, he shows, prefigured colonial-era Orientalist depictions of bhakti as "religion" and tantra as "magic." Providing a broad historical view of bhakti, tantra, and yoga while simultaneously challenging dominant scholarly conceptions of them, A Genealogy of Devotion offers a bold new narrative of the history of religion in India.

Genres: Religion, Nonfiction, History

456 pages, Hardcover

Published May 28, 2019

Reviews

[Michael Nguyen · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are a lot of interesting things mentioned in this book that I would like to research further such as the Kabir, Tulsidas, the Ramanandi's, Chishti Sufism, Premakhyans, the Nath Yogis, Akbar, the history of Tantric Yoga, Kundalini, the Pancha Sakha. I learnt a lot about the interplay between various religious groups, the financial backing that that Vaishnavas received from the Islamicate government at the time, the blurring of boundaries and the setting of new ones, the synthesis and syncretisim, the reclaiming of ancient traditions in a novel context, the appropriation of tantra and yogic ideas into bhakti, and the way tantra was othered yet simultaneously incorporated into Vaishnavism. There's a lot of very dense information in here. Its definitely something for those who are heavily interested in the history of Bhakti Yoga, Bhakti or Bhakti and Yoga, as well as Tantra and Sufism in North India (as we can see, the boundaries are ill-defined and only are "properly" defined according to sectarian lines).