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

• Author: Pauwels, Heidi
• Position: Book review

A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement. By JOHN STRATTON HAWLEY. Cambridge, MA: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2015. Pp. xiv + 438. $49.95

Bhakti, or devotion, is arguably one of the most important strands of contemporary Hinduism, certainly one of the mainstays of the emerging middle classes. Often proclaimed to be the Indian nation's "real religion," it has strong political overtones. Still it remains remarkably understudied in comparison to the plethora of studies on, for instance, yoga, which is more visible in the West. Hawley's groundbreaking new book investigates how "the living bhakti archive," "on the tongues of millions of people," became a resource in national integration (p. 13). It analyzes how multiple narratives in all their constituents became consolidated as one.

Until now there has not been any work offering a grand overview of bhakti. In fact, the vast wealth of bhakti literature is only beginning to be translated, with the Harvard Oriental Series now making room for non-Sanskritic materials (notably Gurinder Singh Mann on the Goindval Pothis [1997] and Edward Dimock and Tony Stewart's Caitanya Caritamrtam [2000]), now hopefully to be followed by the new series, Murty Classical Library of India (Bryant and Hawley 2015, Lutgendorf 2016). Most works that have been published in the US are rather narrower in focus: either on aspects of bhakti (e.g., theater: Hawley and Goswami 1981, image worship: Packert 2010), on regions (e.g., the South: Prentiss 1999, the North: Hawley and Juergensmeyer 1988), or on individual saints (again, just a random selection: Hawley 1984, Venkatesan 2010, Shukla-Bhatt 2014). These tend to be produced overwhelmingly within the field of religious studies, and engage little with history, with the notable exception of the historian William (Vijay) Pinch (1996 and 2006). In Europe every three years there is a International Conference of Early Modern Literatures in North India, informally known as the "Bhakti Conference," the proceedings of which have been forthcoming regularly (the last two: eds. Bangha 2013 and Williams, Malhotra, and Hawley forthcoming). Still, these volumes collect individual research papers, and the editors rarely provide a broad-canvas view. In short, there is nothing resembling an overview of bhakti literature in its historical context.

Now finally such a work has been undertaken by Jack Hawley, distinguished Professor of Religion at Barnard College in New York. He is eminently suitable for the task, as he can built on his lifetime of thinking, writing, and research experience with bhakti studies, as is clear from the frequent appearance of his name in the examples given above. In addition, he has extensive engagement as a teacher of Indian religions and the supervisor of many students who have done excellent work in this area (most recently, inter alia, Patton Burchett 2012, Neeraja Poddar 2014, and Tyler Williams 2014). The result is the work under review here, a state-of-the-art, landmark bhakti book that in asking critical questions shows the way for new generations of bhakti scholars.

The main question addressed in the book is whether one can speak at...