Bhakti Religion in North India: Community Identity and Political Action.

• Author: Gaeffke, Peter

Edited by DAVID N. LORENZEN. SUNY Series of Religious Studies. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS. 1995. Pp. xi + 331.

After six volumes of bhakti studies published by the Conference of Devotional Literature in New Indoaryan Languages (containing the papers read at its triennial meetings mostly by European and South Asian scholars), the book under review is a sort of American answer to the European enterprise. The most obvious difference between the two styles of scholarship is the fact that the Europeans follow still a philological approach, while the Americans seem to think that religious scholarship can not do without social science and politology. In his introduction, D. N. Lorenzen sets the tone. He quotes Marx, Gramsky, and Perry Anderson, has an argument with Gyanendra Pandey's Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, writes about the B.J.P, R.S.S., V.H.P., and stresses "Subaltern Studies."

Consequently, the overarching issue of the book is the jin of the politicized Rama worship that destroyed the Badri Masjid of Faizabad in 1991 and helped the B.J.P. win electoral success. This devious jin had crept out of the innocent bottle of bhakti, which anthropologists (van der Veer), political scientists (Devalle), and sociologists (Juergensmeyer) either try to blame for, or exculpate with regard to, the aggressive Hindu communalism of our days.

While the European scholars, as the six volumes show, are still searching for history "as it was" in order to discover new insights on medieval bhakti from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the Americans enjoy "theory" and use material uncovered by others or themselves to square with their ideologically defined theories of the present.

Of course, not every one of the authors of this volume, which represents a symposium on "Popular Religion and Sociopolitical Dissidence in North India" (sponsored by El Colegio de Mexico), held in Mexico City in 1991, has reached the level of theoretical sophistication of the social scientists. Despite the expectations aroused in the preface, we find a number of interesting papers by authors presenting their dissertation research or spinoffs therefrom - on Yogis in Jodhpur (Daniel Gold), Kina Rami Aghoris in Benares (Roxanne Poormon Gupta), the Ravidas panth (Joseph Schaller), on avatara doctrine in the Kabir Pant (Uma Thukral), the songs of street singers (Edward O. Henry), and on the Radhasoami sect (Mark Juergensmeyer). Other...