Bhakti and Its Public

Abstract

In this essay I want to chart a space for understanding bhakti that moves between the two dominant, and in some ways mutually contradictory, modes of describing bhakti in modern scholarship. 1 These two positions are the idea, on the one hand, that bhakti forms a social movement and, on the other, that bhakti is an act of personal devotion. In between these poles of the broadly social and the strictly personal, I want to suggest that bhakti seeks to form publics of reception rather than communities that imply a single cohesive issue or idiom. I advance the thesis that all manifestations of bhakti are performances and, more to the point, public ones, that is, performances that are part of, or help form, publics of reception. While I would not argue that bhakti never describes a private affair of devotion, the sense in which bhakti enters the history of India is not through the private realm, but through the social world of caste, labor, media (both written and non-written), and markets outside the home and the heart of an individual.To Ça kara, around the ninth century CE, is attributed the argument for an individualized, monist vision of bhakti, which he is said to have expressed in the Çivånanda-lahir by his metaphor of the river, or self, joining the ocean, or Brahman. His broad influence had much to do with philosophical-religious understandings of bhakti in the direction of a personal pursuit. Yet the metaphor is telling-the river may be an individual stream on its way to the ocean, but it is also one of the central venues of collective, social Hindu religious practice (think of the Kumbha Melå or the Ga gå in Banaras) and also, universally, a key site for commerce, economics, travel, and urban development. The river is many things: a boundary, a threat, a source of sustenance, a channel of trade. The river is an apt metaphor for the public, as much as it is for bhakti and religious expression itself (for more on bhakti and rivers, see Feldhaus 1995). Indeed, despite Ça kara's usage, we also find in Sanskrit an impressive series of texts that associate bhakti with public performance. In treatises on aesthetics, and especially in texts attributed to Abhinavagupta in the early eleventh century, the nature of bhakti as affect is debated. Bhakti in this context is beyond rasa, beyond the "flavor" of a performance, but is one of those key "experiences," or bhåvas, that a rasa might explore; all roads, as it were, may lead to bhakti, and it cannot be limited to any particular kind of affect. 2 It is thus understood not only to be a shared experience, International Journal of Hindu Studies 11, 3 (2007): 255-72

Sulh-i kull to Vedānta: The Dādū Panth and the Mughal-Rajput imperial paradigm

“…5 Yet, as will be discussed, this so-called 'feudal-culture' was not really antagonistic to the 'public sphere' of bhakti. Sant movements like the Dādū Panth, which had a wider social base in Rajput, merchant, and landholding pastoral castes, imagined themselves precisely within the new Mughal-Rajput imperial 2 Novetzke (2007) presents a thesis of how bhakti seeks to form 'publics of reception' through performances. This argument complicates previous studies which describe bhakti as either an act of personal devotion or a social movement.…”

“… 2 Novetzke (2007) presents a thesis of how bhakti seeks to form ‘publics of reception’ through performances. This argument complicates previous studies which describe bhakti as either an act of personal devotion or a social movement.…”

Homosexuality and Indian Civil Society: Reading Mahesh Dattani After Decriminalization of Section-377

“…I use the term ‘public’ in the sense that Christian Lee Novetzke defines it: ‘a social unit created through shared cultural phenomena and reinforced by demonstrations in public of these shared cultural phenomena’ (Novetzke, 2007, p. 255). Combining the above concepts, one could argue that for homosexuality to acquire social acceptance (after and beyond the legal one), the making of a public is required.…”

“…The Gay Imaginary in Dattani is made up of specific reconfigurations and reorientations of notions, ideas and myths about the form of language and the institution of marriage. The audience/public is attracted by the ‘technologies of modernity’ (Novetzke, 2007, p. 261), and they play a salient part in witnessing the presence of the ‘other’ (sexual minorities/ other genders). Of such ‘technologies’, I suggest, plays are a prominent example.…”

Public Space, Public Canon: Situating religion at the dawn of modernity in South India

“…Appadurai and Breckenridge, 25 for instance, define public culture as a 'zone of cultural debate', the amorphous spaces between state power and everyday life, amenable to acts of appropriation and resistance, ranging from modern mass culture to the bhakti poetry of low-class poet saints. 26 Such a model, they argue, frees the concept of publicity from the constraints of the limiting conditions of bourgeois modernity, allowing for a strategic response from outside the spheres of print capitalism and the literate bourgeoisie. And, like many other regions across the subcontinent, in the early modern Tamil south, participatory media-from ritual performance to visual iconography-cultivated a non-literate readership, so to speak, that consumed-and responded to-the initiatives of elite social actors.…”