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

• Author: Pauwels, Heidi

A Genealogy of Devotion: Bhakti, Tanlra, Yoga, and Sufism in North India. By PATTON E. BURCHETT. New York: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2019. Pp. viii + 433. 2 plates. $70.

The study of the devotional tradition, or Bhakti, of North India has made much progress in recent years. A major trailblazer in the field, John Stratton Hawley, has fostered a group of excellent PhD students at Barnard College in New York, who have gone on to publish innovative research on the topic. Patton E. Burchett, now assistant professor at the College of William and Mary, is one of them. His ambitious new book is an impressive feat, the result of over a decade of work. Rooted in his original research on an important yet relatively less studied Bhakti group, the RamanandTs. this book offers a fresh take on the early modern religious scene in North India. It foregrounds the contentious interactions and exchanges of Bhakti with other strands now subsumed under the umbrella term "Hinduism." notably Tantra and Yoga, and with the mystical strand of Islam. Sufism (these "strands" joining and unraveling are nicely portrayed as threads of rope on the cover image). One of the book's main agendas is to push beyond the "colonial construct" narrative that dismisses concepts like Tantra as orientalist. Beyond categories, Burchett looks at dynamic movements, each changing over time in mutual interaction. Burchett's study is very ambitious, offering a longue duree perspective of North Indian religious development from 1450 to 1750, but with frequent excursus into what came before and after. The result is a magisterial overview incorporating exciting recent research into a coherent narrative. This book differs from other "genealogies" of Bhakti in its foregrounding of historical sociopolitical factors over philosophy. Whereas traditional narratives typically start with South Indian debates around Advaita, Burchett places religion squarely in the strife and bustle of sociopolitical developments.

The first part of the book sets up the wider historical context, starting in chapter 1 with the medieval prevalence of Tantra "as a broad religiopolitical tradition whose ritual culture, institutional figures and spaces, and cosmological presuppositions were pervasive in early medieval India" (p. 62). The expansion of state society and settled agriculture went hand in hand with that of brahminical tantric civilization, characterized by elite collaboration between kings and religious...