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Mms, Vednta, and the Bhakti Movement

Anand VenkatkrishnanDepartment of Religion

Columbia University

Dissertation Prospectus

January 25, 2013

Table of Contents

1. Introduction1.1 An Opening Salvo.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21.2 Situating the Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9

1.2.1 Intellectual History of Advaita Vednta . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .91.2.2 Sanskrit Knowledge-Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .111.2.3 The Bhakti Movement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14

1.2.4 Non-Western Intellectual History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151.2.5 Religious Intellectuals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

2. Dissertation Outline2.1 Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .212.2 On the Eve of the Early Modern. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .212.3 Mms in the Moonlight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .242.4 Vednta in the Moonlight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .262.5 Bhakti in the Moonlight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .282.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .29

3. Schedule of Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

4. Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

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Jna, Karma, and Bhakti:three ways to reach you.

The first for the disenchanted,to apply themselves to study;the second for the rapacious,

to devote their actions to you;

but the third for thoseneither here nor there,

to holdontight to your love.

Melputtr Nryaa Bhaa, 1587 CE1

1. Introduction

1.1 An Opening Salvo

The politics of identity often makes it seem as though there are few places in whichthe scholarly study of Hinduism and its popular practice and/or self-theorization coincide:

where one is committed to the demystification of ideology, or at least a basic historicist

orientation,2 the other operates on the assumption of (or doxastic argument for)

transcendent authority, scriptural or charismatic, and perpetuates itself through

hagiography and mnemo-history.3 While a healthy degree of distinction is no doubt

desirable, it is precisely the locus of historiography, so frequently and necessarily the site of

greatest conflict between religious and scholarly worlds, which provides the lie to this

polarization. An exemplary case, and where this project finds its inception, is the

historiography of Advaita Vednta: the non-dualist tradition of Upaniadic hermeneutics

which has come to play a significant role in fashioning the modern self-understanding of

Hinduism as a unified, homogeneous entity. The story of Vednta as an important mediator

of India's entry into political modernity, and as a driving force in its religious history, has

been told only intermittently, and can be boiled down to a few representative narratives:

1 Nryayam 96.4 (Skandha 11):jna karmpi bhaktis tritayam iha bhavatprpaka tatra tvat

nirvinm aee viaya iha bhaved jnayoge 'dhikra |saktn karmayogas tvayi ca vinihito ye tu ntyantasakt

npy atyanta virakts tvayi ca dhtaras bhaktiyogo hy amm ||2 I use the term positively and not positivistically, acknowledging but not capitulating to the critique of vulgar

historicist teleology in Chakrabarty 2000: 6-16, 22-23, 237ff.3 Cf. Novetzke 2008: xi, 26-27, 249; Assmann 2000.

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The Vivekananda : Vednta is a timeless yet thoroughly rational philosophy of life,whose infinite plasticity allows it not only to represent the essence of all Hindutraditions, but to adapt itself to the truth of all religions. As thephilosophia perennis,it represents the true cultural heritage of India. The history of Hinduism is thehistory of Vednta.4

The Richard King : Vednta as we experience it is a more or less modern invention, aproduct of the intercultural mimesis between Orientalist scholars, Christianmissionaries, and the Bengali bourgeois intelligentsia of British India. Hindureformers adopted this tradition as a mark of essentialist cultural differencereproducing colonialist motifs of the spiritual or mystic East as opposed to thematerial Westin service of the nationalist struggle against Western politicaldomination. It is now fundamentally a mark of middle-class, syndicated religion.5

The Karl Potter : Vednta is a philosophical system in the great analytical tradition ofboth Western and Indian philosophies. These should be studied comparatively, in

order to glean insights about the spirit and attitudes of the culture that gave rise tothem. The unity of theoretical and practical activity is a unique achievement andcharacteristic of this system.6

There are, no doubt, variations on and within these themes, but what they share, each in a

distinct way, is the view that historical understanding is either an elastic, selective, or

unnecessary enterprise. The first, plainly unselfconscious of its own historicity (or:

ideologypar excellence), sees history as a continuum, absent of ruptures and contingencies;

the second, in its crude versions, tends to equate history with modernity, and modernity

with the colonial episteme, relegating precolonial knowledge-systems to a historical

afterthought;7the third, absorbed in its own anti-political Geistesgeschichte, abstracts

philosophical study from historical specificity, engaging in the sort of intellectual

comparison, for example, that brings akara and Bradley into the same analytical

framework.8 Regardless of the differences in motivation and discipline between the

proponents of these narratives, they retain in common the idea that Vednta and its impact

can be comprehended with an imperfect understanding of historical meaning.

4 Cf. Radhakrishnan 1927: 18: All sects attempt to interpret the Vedanta texts in accordance with their ownreligious views. The Vedanta is not a religion, but religion itself in its most universal and deepest significance.

5 Cf. King 1999: 118-142; Thapar 2000; Chatterjee 1986: 64-81.6 Cf. Back volumes of theJournal of Indian Philosophy.7 It should be emphasized, however, that King (1995) himself began his career studying the relationship between

early Advaita Vednta and Mahyna Buddhism.8 Pollock 2008: 537, n.10.

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It is not surprising, then, that in spite of the overwhelming amount of ink spilled on

Vednta from colonial times, we still have very little knowledge of its intellectual history

that is, following Quentin Skinner's succinct formulation, to situate the texts we study

within such intellectual contexts as enable us to make sense of what their authors were

doing in writing them.9 If the neo-Vedntins provide us with a quasi-Hegelian

interpretation of the Vedntic spirit moving through Indian history, attributing to its

irresistible flow everything from the demise of Buddhism to the rise of Vijayanagara as a

bulwark of supposed Hindu resistance to Muslim encroachment,10the philosophers

fashion an ethereal world of analytical reconstruction, a geography virtually denuded of

historical meaning. The industry of modern India studies, for its part, tends to have little

patience for the textual products of precolonial intellectuals, often our only source for

discerning their historical situatedness. As a result, the state of Vednta scholarship

remains at best a paradox, at worst a bad joke: we have studied a tradition seemingly to

death, without the barest understanding of its life in particular historical worlds.11

Only very recently have scholars begun to write a social and intellectual history of

Advaita Vednta, beginning with the early modern era (ca. 1500 CE-1800 CE): a

periodization of global intellectuality proposed by the project Sanskrit Knowledge Systems

on the Eve of Colonialism.12 In brief, the project has sought to understand the full effect of

the purported epistemic rupture initiated by colonial technologies of rule on traditionalmodes of Sanskrit theoretical production13 by studying the prolific output of such

intellectual content in the early modern period. The group's work aims to examine seven

disciplines in their bibliographical, prosopographical, and substantive dimensions, selected

for their centrality to Sanskrit culture, comparative and historical value, and/or their new

vitality in the early modern period. These disciplines are: vykaraa (language analysis),

9 Skinner 2002: 3.10 For a complication of these identity categories when applied to medieval South Indian history, cf. Talbot 1995;

for Vijayanagara in particular, cf. Wagoner 1996.11 Andrew Nicholson (2010: 18) epitomizes the issue with admirable straightforwardness and clarity: Sanskrit

intellectual traditions should be approached not as a rarefied sphere of discourse hovering above everyday lifeand historical time but, rather, as a human practice arising in the messy and contingent economic, social, and

political worlds that these intellectuals occupied.12 The impetus for and contributions to this project have been summarized in Pollock 2011: 1-16.13 Cf. Kaviraj 2005: 119-124.

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One problematic that continues to straddle the boundary between history and

hagiography, however, is the relationship between bhakti and Advaita Vednta. The very

idea of the bhakti movement, currently the subject of a forthcoming monograph by John

Stratton Hawley, has given rise to several competing narratives regarding this relationship.

On one side are those (eg. Grierson 1910) for whom bhakti as a proto-Reformationist

theology of devotional faith, grounded in the intensely personal, rapturous experience of

God, represents a fundamental rejection of the pantheistic Brahman of the Advaita

Vednta. On the opposite side are those (eg. Sharma 1987) for whom the previous narrative

is a colonial fiction, a misrepresentation of the real religion of the Hindus as monotheistic

instead of monistic; they propose an alternative perspective which reads the nirgu

tradition of vernacular bhakti poetry as seamlessly co-referential with non-dualist

philosophy. In a similar vein, there are those (eg. Tapasyananda 1990) who find that all

bhakti and Vednta sects can be regarded a unity when considered from a higher

perspective which relativizes non-dual and empirical experience. Others (eg. Sen 1930)

have viewed bhakti as a radical disavowal of orthoprax, highbrow, dry-as-dust

scholasticism in favor of true spiritual sentiment. Another group (eg. Raghavan 1966)

considers the bhakti saints and singers to have been the great integrators of India,

bridging the gap between elite theology and popular religion, and preemptively mapping

the nascent nation-state. And still others (eg. Nelson 1986; Mishra 1967) have taken it astheir task to arbitrate the metaphysical compatibility of bhakti, qua religious devotion to a

personal god, with jna qua experience of non-dual reality, by handpicking

representative texts for a properly philosophical reconstruction.

The problem with each of these modern accounts is that they fit rather neatly into

corresponding premodern accounts of the conflict, depending on how selectively one reads

the historical record. Listen to a few poems by Kabir (14th C.?) and the world will appear as

illusory as the Vedntins believe. Read the diatribes of the sixteenth-century GauyaVaiava theologian Jva Gosvmin and Advaita Vednta will seem like a blot on India's

religious landscape. Study the treatises of his contemporary Madhusdana Sarasvat and

find an ambivalent philosophical negotiation between his Advaitic and devotional

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commitments. Uncover the political motivations behind the attempt to excise Advaita from

among the potential predecessors of the bhakti traditions of North India, through the

articulation of the four-samprady rubric,18 and trace your way to the court of Maharaja

(alias Sawai) Jai Singh II of Jaipur, where the narrative became pivotal in top-down

efforts to regulate religion that were initiated at the Kachvh court in the first half of the

eighteenth century.19The point is that we remain saddled with a fragmented

understanding of the relationship between bhakti and Advaita Vednta, largely due to an

incomplete study of their historical intersections in precolonial India.

My aim in this dissertation is to contribute to this historical problematic by

attempting to understand how, when, and why bhakti (religious devotion) comes to

occupy a theoretical space within Sanskrit intellectual discourse, both supplementing and

supplanting established systems of scriptural hermeneutics: specifically, Mms and

Vednta, the two representative discourses of karma (ritual activity) and jna

(philosophical gnosis) respectively. Although these were two historically adversarial

intellectual identities for much of their early interaction, Mms and Vednta were

fundamentally disciplines of reading texts, and the latter (uttara) was ever and always

embedded in the interpretive methodology of the former (prva). I contend that the

introduction of new scriptural corpora, in particular the Bhgavata Pura (10th C., South),

into the established canon of Vedic source-texts (ruti and smti), prompted anunprecedented self-reflexivity on the part of intellectuals trained in the disciplines of

Mms and Vednta. The Bhgavata's deliberations on the tensions between bhakti

and a broader discourse of scriptural orthodoxy and social hierarchy (dharma) were

negotiated not only in narrative or didactic fashion, but scholastically as well. Moreover, the

adaptation of the Bhgavata by communities of local, vernacular devotional practice,

filtered back into the forbidding world of scriptural hermeneutics, ultimately pushing

through the glass ceiling of Sanskrit intellectuality. It is my purpose in this dissertation to18 As Hawley (2011: 160) explains, this genealogical narrative, in which the sectarian traditions, thesampradys,

of Rmnand, Keav Bha Kmr, Caitanya, and Vallabhcrya find their ancestry in four Vaiava Vedntacounterparts in the south, probably took shape around the mid-seventeenth century. Although the VallabhiteSampradyapradpa dates itself to the sixteenth century, Hawley (2011: 174) suggests that we cannot yetdetermine whether it should be read as a historical reconstruction or a creative forgery.

19 Hawley 2011: 161.

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trace the shifting discursive registers of Mms and Advaita Vednta with regard to the

new religious trends of the bhakti movement, through a study of the textual products and

intellectual lineages of particular scholars20 from the 13th to the 17th centuries.

Some of this background will be familiar to us already. We have learned from Daniel

Sheridan (1986) to speak of the Advaitic theism of the Bhgavata Pura, and it was

commonplace by the sixteenth century to invoke the tripartite formulation of yogas in the

epigram to this introduction.21But what were the specific contours of this development:

geographically, textually, historically? When and why did practitioners of Mms, an

ostensibly atheistic discipline, begin to exhibit explicit theistic commitments in their

intellectual writing? In what ways did the Bhgavata become a focal point for Advaita

Vednta exegesis, and how was this legacy negotiated by later Vedntins of all stripes? How

did Sanskrit intellectuals deal with the problem of vernacularization when it came to

represent specifically religious modes of expression? What of the Bhakti Stras, the

Aphorisms on Bhakti, so explicitly modeled on their first-millennium Mms and

Vednta predecessors, yet hardly ever mentioned or commented upon until the

seventeenth century? What, in the end, is the coherence of the discrete labels we have

applied to these knowledge-systemsMms, Advaita Vednta, and so forthwhen they

are more like fragmented puzzles than harmonious wholes?

Not only do we not have answers to these questions, but the questions themselveshave yet to be asked with any degree of analytical consistency. I hope that this dissertation

will go some way toward improving our understanding of these issues by investigating the

relationship between popular religious movements and the rarefied air of scholarly

pedagogy; the challenges which the subversive undercurrents of bhakti religiosity posed

to normative scholastic traditions; how personal religious commitments prompted

Sanskrit intellectuals to think innovatively about their multiple intellectual inheritances;

and the ways in which, to invoke Quentin Skinner once more, philosophical argument isoften deeply intertwined with claims to social power.22

20 I will elaborate on these in my dissertation outline below; see 2.2-2.5.21 It is worth noting here that Nryaa Bhaa was quite the Mmsaka and Advaita Vedntin himself (cf.

Mnameyodaya), let alone an accomplished poet and scholar ofvykaraa. Cf. Zimmermann 2008.22 Skinner 2002: 7.

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1.2 Situating the Project

1.2.1 Intellectual History of Advaita Vednta

It is useful to conceive of this dissertation's contribution to academic discourse by

framing it within five concentric circles of scholarly discussion, each of which is broader

than the previous.23 The first and innermost circle is the intellectual history of Advaita

Vednta. For too long, Advaita Vednta has been studied through two dominant scholarly

lenses: first, a lingering Orientalist topos which deems the earliest expression of poetic or

philosophical thought to be its unalterable essence, and determines all later developments

to be symptoms of decay or degeneracy;24and second, a skewed emphasis on Advaita's

purely philosophical dimensions, which consigns historical considerations to the margins.A combination of these two approachesexemplified by the early twentieth-century

historian of philosophy Surendranath Dasgupta's assessment of literary activity in early

modern Advaita as syncretistic, lacking in originality, and philosophically

uninteresting25has left a serious lacuna in our understanding of the life of Advaita on the

eve of colonialism, let alone the social history of teaching lineages and textual transmission

in medieval Advaita. Moreover, as Christopher Minkowski (2011: 205) queries at the outset

of his essay, what does it mean in the first place to write a social history of this unworldlyphilosophy, to study how it was affected by (and in turn affected) those external, empirical

factors in which it exhibited such little conceptual interest?

Although he engages with Randall Collins' (1999) sociology of world philosophies,

Minkowski (2011: 220-2) himself refrains from offering a theory of intellectual change in

early modern Advaita, and only comments on the ascendancy of Mughal rule and its

beneficial effect on the fortunes of Sanskrit philosophers. In my estimation, the recovery of

Advaita intellectual history would benefit foremost from a shift in scholarly focus from

exclusively philosophical to hermeneutical innovation. Larry McCrea (2008: 576) provides

the most lucid exposition of this approach:

23 I am adopting here the model provided in Hudson 2006: 54ff.24 Cf. Bronner 2010: 17.25 Minkowski 2011: 206, 212.

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If we are to make sense of the later development of Sanskrit systematic thought...wemust look not simply for changes in the answers practitioners of these disciplinesgive to the big questions of their fields, but to look for other measures ofintellectual-historical development: changes in modes of argument, in genres andstyles of writing, and in the attitudes authors in these fields bear toward their own

works and the traditions from which they emerge.26

In other words, to study Advaita in history means to be attentive to its own sense of change.

As I will show through the course of my thesis, many of these changes turn out not to be

philosophical at all, in the sense of promulgating new Advaita Vednta doctrine, but

rather hermeneutical; it is the shifting registers of scholastic discourse which betray

distinct historical tensions, to which intellectuals attempted to respond in illocutionary

fashion. Such innovations were not only pervasive in the world of Vednta, but were part of

the fabric of Sanskrit intellectual life in early modern India. Moreover, the permeability ofdisciplinary boundaries emblematic of this syncretistic eraboundaries which were

themselves only beginning to be systematized in doxographical fashion,27 for fragmentation

is the necessary corollary of syncretismwas perhaps nowhere more evident than

between Mms and Vednta. Yet this later history has been all but subsumed under the

modern encyclopedic effort to delineate the real spirit of Indian philosophy, neatly

packageable into discrete doctrines, stripped of their historical specificity.

My contention is that it is precisely the categorization of Vednta thinkers as

philosophers that has contributed to the negligence regarding the later transformations of

the tradition, inasmuch as these transformations had more to do with a particular kind of

historical consciousness: one which juxtaposed contingency and difference in the

intellectual resources of a philosophical tradition with their malleability, their constant

relevance.28In order to recover these transformations, and thus the historical agency of

their authors, works of Advaita Vednta should be studied as intellectual interventions in

their own right. Whether this sort of intellectual history should be a preliminary step to

26 On the new genre of introductory manuals in the Indian intellectual scene, cf. Pollock 2008: 538.27 On the history of the schematic classification of doctrines in premodern India, cf. Nicholson 2010: 144-165.28 Cf. Ganeri 2011: 73: Jumping back across a rupture, while continuing to be indelibly marked by it,

reconceptualizing the pre-rupture past in the categories of a post-rupture presentthese are among the mostcharacteristic hallmarks of early modern Indian intellectual practice.

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proper philosophical understanding,29 or a privileged task in itself which questions the

binary between philosophy and history,30 I believe it is indispensable for future scholarship

in the field.

1.2.2 Sanskrit Knowledge-Systems

Moving outward, the second concentric circle is comprised of the aforementioned

project Sanskrit Knowledge-Systems on the Eve of Colonialism. There are two ways in

which my dissertation engages this project: first, in terms of the addition of Vedntaor

perhaps in systemic terms, theological inquiryto the disciplines studied; second, by

complicating the epistemic nature of the periodization of the early modern. As to the first,

it is not fair to speculate on the reasons for Vednta's omission, especially given the

project's provisional (though very successful) nature, so we will only reiterate the

suggestion that Vednta fulfills and exceeds the criteria for inclusion. But as for the second,

before offering my emendation to the early modern periodization, I will try to summarize

the reasoning behind it. As a first-order category, the early modern describes a global

phenomenon, which, as the social historian John Richards (1997: 198-203) argues, consists

of six distinct but complementary large-scale processes: 1) the creation of global sea

passages and an increasingly efficient transportation network; 2) the rise of a truly global

world economy; 3) the unprecedented growth around the world of large, stable states; 4)the doubling of world population; 5) the intensified use of land to expand production; and

6) the diffusion of several new technologies and organizational responses to them.While

there are objections to including South Asia in this world history,31 tracking these changes

in the social history of the early modern world allows us an additional lens into the

corresponding intellectual changes which have come to define the European sense of its

own modernity, and which find remarkable though inexact parallels in India.

29 Cf. Nicholson 2010: 22: Once this project of hermeneutical recovery has been provisionally accomplished,these thinkers' works can become potential participants in twenty-first-century philosophical conversations.

30 Cf. Skinner 2002: 125: [S]uch investigations enable us to question the appropriateness of any strong distinctionbetween matters of 'merely historical' and of 'genuinely philosophical' interest, since they enable us to recognisethat our own descriptions and conceptualisations are in no way uniquely privileged.

31 Richards 1997: 204-5. For a more sober assessment of the difficulties with such periodization, in particular themany guises of modernity in sociological and historical writing, cf. Goldstone 1998.

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This intellectual newness was first laid out in a famous essay by Sheldon Pollock

(2001). The essay identifies a set of innovations in the conceptions and discursive protocols

of early modern Sanskrit intellectuals, as well as the structure and substance of the new

sense of historicality according to which their scholarly work began to be organized (6).

Pollock claims that according to the construction of modernity that judges it to be a

different mode of structuring temporality, whereby the 'continuous present' of tradition

gives way to a world in which the past and the future are understood as discrete

phenomena, a modernity of a certain sort must be said to confront us here (22). However,

when the intellectual production of early modern India is juxtaposed with comparable

developments in Europe, the divergence in historical trajectory could not be more stark:

nothing like the Querelle des anciens et des moderns , or Descartes' renewal of everything

from first principles, or the philosophical seeds of radical egalitarian thought, can be

found in the Indian intellectual sphere (23). And while this seeming failure led to such

normative colonial-era judgments regarding the stultifying, essentially stagnant nature of

premodern India,32 Pollock does make the provocative claim that In the face of European

modernity, Indian systems of thought, or rather Sanskrit systems, simply vanished as a

significant force in Indian history (24).

This declaration regarding the death of Sanskrit knowledgenot causally but

coevally linked to the imposition of colonial modernityhas been contested by severalparties, who generally point to the continuity of Sanskrit as a vital language of public

disputation in the colonial period.33Pollock himself has moved away from characterizing

the Sanskrit scholarly trend to apply the new subtleties of argumentation to the analysis of

ancient categories as simply another instance of arrested developmentthat is, as a

newness that could not achieve innovation: a newness of the intellect constrained by an

oldness of the will.34What we must resist, Pollock now claims, is conceptual symmetry;

what we require instead is historical synchronicity.

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If this new intellectuality did not

32 Who could forget Arthur Macdonell's pithy claim that early India wrote no history because it never made any?Cf. Pollock 2001: 4; Macdonell 1900: 11.

33 Notably, cf. Hatcher 2007.34 Pollock 2001: 19.35 Pollock 2011: 4.

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transform into a condition of the secular modern, then the fault lies not with the text

traditions themselves, but with our expectation in hindsight of some inevitable

developmental goal.36For as Richard Eaton (2000: 61) astutely comments in a different

context, to study this moment as one of failure, as a non-event, would be to commit the

historical fallacy of attempting to explain a counter-factual proposition.

While the ability to think comparatively about European and Indian intellectuality is

an attractive proposition and a salutary accomplishment, as with all macro-narratives it is

bound to provoke dissent from particular corners. Parimal Patil (forthcoming) has taken up

the case of Navya Nyya, which does not exactly fit the model articulated above. From the

composition of Gagea's Tattvacintmai in thirteenth-century Mithil, to Vsudeva

Srvabhauma's introduction of the discipline into fifteenth-century Bengal, to Jaganntha

Tarkapacnana's participation in multiple epistemic worlds in eighteenth-century

Calcutta,37 Navya Nyya has both experienced several moments of newness dispersed

across the second millennium and remained a continuous discipline well into the colonial

period. A similar case could be made for Advaita Vednta: although there is a marked

increase in literary activity during the period specified, and new genres enter the discursive

world, many philosophical and hermeneutical innovations can be traced to the fourteenth

and fifteenth centurieseras for which and preceding which we have little by way of

intellectual-historical contextualization.38 As I propose to discuss in my dissertation, bytracing the many lives of the Bhgavata Pura, this is especially the case for the

relationship between Advaita and bhakti. Moreover, as previously discussed, this tradition

of philosophical theology flourished not only throughout the early modern subcontinent,

but well into its colonial and nationalist modernity, of which it became partly constitutive.

Thus even though we need not adopt a thoroughgoing skepticism of the politics of

time which governs the act of periodization,39 the concept of the early modern as a period

36 Pollock 2011: 2.37 Jaganntha wrote a commentary on the Tattvacintmai and was enlisted by William Jones to be the chief pandit

overseeing the composition of the Vivdabhagrava, the sourcebook for the infamousDigest of Hindu Law, atranslation completed by H.T. Colebrooke in 1796. Cf. Rocher 1995: 62.

38 There are a mere handful of articles and essays of varying reliability, and hardly any which postdate the 1960s,which discuss the collective historical information we have about medieval Advaita teachers; cf. Sastri 1938;Mahadevan 1968.

39 Cf. Davis 2008.

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of intellectual change, which can be mapped provisionally onto corresponding changes in

social and political conditions, needs to be particularized for each Sanskrit knowledge-

system, taking account of: a) its medieval intellectual history, and b) its resilience in the

face of colonial encounter. If we do not begin from the proposition that the early modern is

a unique epistemic period applicable across Sanskrit disciplines, we may be more attentive

to alternative historical possibilities and predecessors, without necessarily losing sight of

the profound social changes that characterized the early modern world.

1.2.3 The Bhakti Movement

The third concentric circle is that of ongoing scholarship on the bhakti movement,

or more specifically, the narrativization of the rise and development of devotional traditions

and communities in early modern North India. Although much of this work (eg. Hare 2011;

Hawley forthcoming; Horstmann 2011; Williams forthcoming) is being conducted with

reference to vernacular languages, Sanskrit remained an important medium for articulating

theories and typologies of bhakti. Whatever one may make of the arguments for or against

the causal links between religious sentiment and vernacular expression,40 the cosmopolitan

world of Sanskrit intellectual discourse was certainly affected, albeit selectively, and in ways

we have yet to discern thoroughly, by the spread of devotional (particularly Vaiava)

theistic traditions across the medieval and early modern subcontinent.41 This part of myresearch attempts to understand the challenges which bhakti, qua public expression of

personal devotion, posed to Sanskrit intellectuals.

The stakes of this inquiry are greater than simply improving our understanding of

the religious topography of early modern North India. As Vasudha Dalmia (1995; 1997:

338ff.) has demonstrated, for nineteenth-century public intellectuals like Bhratendu

Harichandra, proto-nationalist debates over what constituted the only real religion of the

Hindus centered around the crystallization of a monotheistic Vaiava bhakti as theessential feature of modern Hinduisma narrative which appears to parallel, and at times

40 See especially Pollock 2006: 423ff. Also cf. Bronner 2011: 542-3.41 For an example of the vernacular cosmopolitan in the Sanskrit literary realm, cf. Knutson 2011.

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run into, the Vednta-centric one adumbrated above.42These debates over the boundaries

and composition of what would come to be called Hinduism, however, have a longer

genealogy; to take one example, James Hare (2011: 162) points to the Bhaktamlof

Nbhds (1600 CE) as a text which, by the late nineteenth century, through its imagination

of an expansive devotional community, had become a key ingredient in the nationalist-

tinged Hindu devotionalism that would come to define modern Hinduism. The Bhaktaml

itself, moreover, pays obeisance not only to the vernacular bhakti saints who dotted the

North Indian landscape, but also to famous exegetes of the Advaita Vednta tradition:

akara, Citsukha, Nsihraya, and Madhusdana Sarasvat, among others.43

The relationship between bhakti and jna, then, far from being solely a matter

of metaphysical reconciliation, should be investigated as an important component and

byproduct of the social and political changes of early modern and colonial India. Recent

studies of the ways in which precolonial social formations helped shape India's modernity

have focused on the role of native intellectuals in the production of colonial knowledge

(Wagoner 2003), the political role of warrior ascetics in the consolidation of British

power (Pinch 2006), and the preeminence of Maratha Brahman scholar families under

Mughal patronage (O'Hanlon 2011). As an intellectual historian of religion, I hope that my

research into the relationship between precolonial intellectuals and devotional

communities will contribute to the study of both the religious history of early modern Indiaas well as the development of Hinduism in the colonial modern.

1.2.4 Non-Western Intellectual History

Surrounding this circle is the discipline of intellectual history on the whole, and the

problem of its methodological viability for the study of Indian knowledge-systems. For an

eloquent rendering of the challenges involved in the general study of Indian intellectual

history, we may turn to another essay by Sheldon Pollock, worth quoting here in full:

42 Although Harichandra himself belonged to the Vallabhasamprady, whose apotheosis ofbhakti as the highestform of religion was predicated on a longstanding hostility to Advaita Vednta, by the early twentieth century,the famous literary historian Hazariprasad Dvivedi would speak of the bhakti movement (ndolan) as Vednta-inspired (vednt-bhvit). Cf. Hawley forthcoming.

43 Cf. Mishra 1967: 2-3.

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What has characterized, indeed virtually defined, Euro-American intellectual historyover the past five decades, certainly from the rise of the Cambridge School in the 1960s,and which the New Historicism of the 1980s and 1990s served to reinforce, is thecommitment to deep contextualism: for many of its practitioners in the Europeantradition, intellectual history is entirely a question of charting the production of and

intention behind ideas in specific times and places. In India, however, a mix of peculiarcultural-political and environmental factors make this dimension of historical practicevery difficult. The non-textualization of life-events (birth, marriage, death); the absenceof a political absolutism whose cruel documentary invigilation over its own subjectswas, in some small measure, compensated for by the archival richness left to posterity; aclimate that destroyed whatever was not recopied every few generations; and, for theSanskrit intellectual milieu, a constitutional disinclination to time-space localization anda cultural proscription of self-advertisementthese factors and others have conspired toleave the social record of Sanskrit intellectuals a virtual blank.44

Recent developments in the study of early modern India have begun to address these

problems in different ways. One such development is in the work of Jonardon Ganeri, whose

research into the discipline of Navya Nyya includes a reappraisal of one of the classic

theorists of European intellectual history, Quentin Skinner.45Ganeri suggests that Skinner's

conception of the text in contextthat is, the situation of a particular document in its

biographical, social, political, and literary contexts, which allows us to infer the

illocutionary intervention the text is makingis at once too rich and too poor for the study

of Indian intellectual history: the former because we hardly possess even a rudimentary

knowledge of the circumstances of composition of the texts of Indian intellectuals; and thelatter because we might instead read the Indian texts in what Ganeri (2008: 553-4) calls

their intertextual contexts. In its literary and intellectual context, the Indian text may be

read as a kind of intrasystemic intervention: in other words, when the intellectual

context is the knowledge system itself, we may read texts as proleptic speech

interventions intentionally directed towards future audiences (2008: 555-6).

Thus, instead of decrying, as Skinner does, the mythology of prolepsis, in which the

retrospective significance of a given episode is more important than its meaning for the

agent at the time,46we should accept the possibility that the meaning of the episode is

44 Pollock 2008: 537.45 Cf. Ganeri 2011: 63-73; Ganeri 2008: 551-6.46 Cf. Skinner 2002: 73.

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itself proleptic, and that this is deeply constitutive of the intellectual reality we are trying to

study.47Equally constitutive, argues Ganeri, is what Skinner dismissively terms the

mythology of doctrine: a presumption that there is some given set of doctrines that

comprise a field, which prompts the historian to discern what each classic author said (or

failed to say) about them.48 While this may be considered a deficiency among modern

scholars, Ganeri (2011: 69) suggests that Indian intellectuals viewed the ancient texts upon

which they commented as current statements of philosophical knowledge precisely by

appeal to an idea of 'anticipation': specifically thattheytook the developed doctrine and

argument of the stra in question to have been already anticipated in its earliest writings.

In other words, we should view the two mythologies as beneficial (bhaam) and not

detrimental (na tu daam) when we study these texts in context.

It is debatable whether or not Ganeri's revision of Skinner can simply be regarded an

extension of his method. As far as my project's methodology is concerned, I am quite

content to build on and adapt the insights of theorists from Skinner (2002) and J.G.A.

Pocock (2009) to Richard Rorty (1984) and Reinhart Koselleck (2002). Where I differ from

them is in my choice of topic. Intellectual history, as Peter Gordon (2012) remarks in his

essay on the discipline, most closely affiliates itself with the fields of philosophy, political

theory, cultural history, and sociology. Religion, if at all discussed, is generally

epiphenomenal to the thinkers listed above, not out of any particular ideologicalcommitment, but as a general function of the fields in which they work. In this sense, my

work follows Parimal Patil's (2009: 13) gesture to the need for creating a space for the

intellectual history of religions within religious studies, and a space for religion among

intellectual historians.

Andrew Nicholson (2010: 14) has also recently invoked Rorty's definition of

intellectual history as including books about all of those enormously influential people

who do not get into the canon of the great dead philosophers [...]

49

However, Nicholson(2010: 22) goes on to advocate for the inclusion of premodern Indian philosophers within

47 Cf. Ganeri 2011: 68-9.48 Skinner 2002: 59.49 Cf. Rorty 1984: 69.

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the genre of intellectual history, in order that they may become participants in twenty-

first-century philosophical conversations. I am less interested in maintaining this sort of

history of philosophy (Geistesgeschichte)to which Rorty (1984: 53-4) so obstinately clings,

because I want to move away from categorizing the intellectuals in my project as

philosophers at all. My sympathies lie instead with the broader conceptual history

(Begriffsgeschichte) urged by Koselleck, et al.,50 and the following Skinnerian sentiment:

[O]ne of the uses of the past arises from the fact that we are prone to fall under the spellof our own intellectual heritage. As we analyse and reflect on our normative concepts, itis easy to become bewitched into believing that the ways of thinking about thembequeathed to us by the mainstream of our intellectual traditions must be theways ofthinking about them. Given this situation, one of the contributions that historians canmake is to offer us a kind of exorcism. If we approach the past with a willingness tolisten, with a commitment to trying to see things their way, we can hope to prevent

ourselves from becoming too readily bewitched. An understanding of the past can helpus to appreciate how far the values embodied in our present way of life, and our presentways of thinking about those values, reflect a series of choices made at different timesbetween different possible worlds.51

Skinner's invocation of different possible worlds is not one that derives from the

philosophical content of his subject, la Nicholson, but from the discipline of historical

study itself. That is, the value we may derive from revisiting the thinkers of the past is

embedded in ourchoice of methodology, and not necessarily, or even primarily, in their

oeuvre. This is not to diminish their philosophical value, but to subject it to the exigenciesof what Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1998: 148) would call critical corporate self-

consciousness, the acknowledgment of our collective participation in assigning as well as

receiving value from our intellectual progenitors.52

I believe that one of the intellectual heritages we should first question when

engaging with the premodern Indian sciences is that of Indian philosophy, especially

through what Nicholson (2010: 15) calls the hegemonic narrative...of Advaita Vednta as

the essence and culmination of Indian philosophical systems [...] Nicholson and others

have ably demonstrated the nineteenth-century establishment of this narrative, and the

50 Cf. Richter 1995: 1-25.51 Skinner 2002: 6.52 For a fuller elaboration of the moral-methodological claim being made here, cf. Skinner 2002: 57-89, Meaning

and Understanding in the History of Ideas.

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way it has become intrinsic to the nationalist self-definition of Hinduism as a unified entity.

But rather than search for competing counternarratives, which may contribute to a

different appreciation of Indian philosophy, I am more interested in the rise of that

narrative itself, and how the very category of philosophy has been central to the

marginalization of historical change which Nicholson rightly bemoans.53 That is, I consider

the problem of the historiography of knowledge-systems like Advaita Vednta to be more

central to the recovery of premodern Indian intellectual thought than is philosophical

understanding, in some ways the complementary reverse of Nicholson's project. The way

in which the past acts upon us, the anxiety of influence, and the reading and writing

practices in which we as scholars participatein other words, historywere no less the

concerns of the thinkers we study as philosophers. Yet it is precisely access to history that

we are reluctant to allow these Indian intellectuals, or at best subsume under their

supposedly more salient philosophical concerns.

1.2.5 Religious Intellectuals

The final and most exterior concentric circle is that of religious studies, my

disciplinary home, and the study of religious intellectuals within it. One of the questions I

have proposed for this project is: what sort of challenge did the public expression of

personal devotion pose to early modern Sanskrit intellectuals? My research confirms that

there is a long history to the popular impression of bhakti as true or real religion, as

opposed to traditions of self-serving scholarship. In the writings of certain early modern

religious intellectuals, Mms and Vednta, as pedagogical enterprises, come to possess

an almost secular character, not so much for their subject matter, but in the sense of being

directed toward this-worldly, material self-interest; bhakti, on the other hand, occupies a

domain radically incommensurate with the demands of the former. This was a tension

which scholars in early modern India articulated and sought actively to resolve, and it is not

difficult to see parallels in their situation with that of present-day academic theologians.

53 Cf. Nicholson 2010: 11: Books titled 'The History of Indian Philosophy' rarely deal with history. The 'historical'portion of such books is generally limited to a few sentences at the beginning of each section listing thephilosopher's dates and (optionally) in which part of India he lived.

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In fact, I suggest that it is more instructive to place these concerns about the vexed

relationship between religious and secular intellectual life alongside those of our time,

rather than juxtapose early modern Indian scholars with their European contemporaries.

For the situation seems to have been almost reversed: early modern Europe was the site of

what Jonathan Israel (2001) calls radical enlightenment, when philosophy, no longer the

handmaiden of theology, began to contribute to the rationalization and secularization that

were to become hallmarks of European modernity. The struggle for independent secular

inquiry, however, was forged amidst the constant specter of internecine religious warfare,

and against a political and theological absolutism which sought to silence intellectual

freedom through increasingly repressive forms of invigilation.54 In early modern India, by

contrast, intellectuals appear not only to have been totally free,55but to have thrived under

the patronage of Hindu and Muslim rulers alike, in a society where religious pluralism was

the norm rather than the exception. Moreover, what we could consider intellectual

orthodoxy in early modern India was perceived, in the account of certain disgruntled

devotees, to have been, if not quite secular in function, insufficiently religious in nature; it

was, as I have suggested, the influence of popular religious movements from below which

ultimately made theistic commitments an inescapable component of philosophical and

general intellectual discourse.56

Whether or not we can say convincingly that bhakti corresponds to religionwithout offending someone's sensibilities of translation, it is important to consider the

possibility. How this might affect the way we think about the category of the religious

intellectual awaits further research. Only a further intellectual history and

prosopographical study of precolonial Indian scholars can reveal the extent to which their

formal and technical concerns may be mapped onto the social changes of the early modern

world.57One thing, however, is certain: bhakti was on the move in early modern India, and

it moved scholars to think in new ways about their multiple intellectual inheritances.54 Cf. Pollock 2005: 85-6.55 Cf. Pollock 2001: 30.56 I will shy away from making firm claims about the religious and secular domains of Indian intellectual life,

especially given the exhaustive (-ing?) discussions in Taylor 2007. For thoughts on the desecularization ofIndian philosophy around the turn of the first millennium, cf. McCrea forthcoming.

57 Cf. O'Hanlon and Minkowski 2008: 410.

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2. Dissertation Outline

2.1 Introduction

In addition to recapitulating the theoretical and methodological issues raised above,

my introduction will review the major themes and problems in previous scholarship on the

historical intersections between bhakti and Advaita Vednta. This is not so long a list as one

may expect, even when reading across Sanskrit, Hindi, and German sources.58Other than

the obligatory gesture toward S. Dasgupta's (1922-55) five-volume History of Indian

Philosophy, four works call for particular attention: Adya Prasad Mishra's (1967) attempt to

prove that a continuous discourse on bhakti features throughout the history of Advaita

Vednta literature; Krishna Sharma's (1987) revisionist picture of the bhakti movement

as a Western scholarly construct, insufficiently attuned to the monistic element in Indian

religious history; Lance Nelson's (1986) dissertation on the Bhaktirasyana of

Madhusdana Sarasvat, the famous sixteenth-century Advaita Vedntin who sought to

reconcile his nondualist and devotional commitments; and Sanjukta Gupta's (2006)

philosophical reconstruction of Madhusdana's total oeuvre. I will examine each of these

with a view to their intellectual-historical merits and fallacies. Ultimately, I will suggest that

our investigation of this nexus should begin with the Bhgavata Pura's popularization

and exegesis in particular historical settings.

2.2 On the Eve of the Early Modern

Ostensibly, the place to begin this investigation would be the writings of Rmnuja

(11th C.) and Madhva (13th C.), the famous Vaiava founders of the Viidvaita and Dvaita

schools of Vednta. However, the Bhgavata does not seem to have played a major role in

the development of their theologies. Sucharita Adluri (2009: iii) has demonstrated the far

greater role of the Viu Pura (VP) as a text of fundamental importance for Rmnuja's

58 The first two are by and large ideologically consistent. The German study of Advaita Vednta, fromSchopenhauer and Deussen through to Paul Hacker, was more concerned with close philological and universal(allgemeine) philosophical reconstruction than with the particularity of historical change; bhakti appears tohave been of comparatively little interest.

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theological enterprise, although Adluri's study of the ways in which the VP exceeds its use

as a text of scriptural corroboration (upabhaa) will be germane to our discussion. As

for Madhva, his Bhgavata-Ttparya-Niraya is perhaps the first extant work of Vednta

which approaches the Bhgavata as an independent theological source-text.59 True to

Madhva's inimitable inventiveness, however, this text is less a work of exegesis than a series

of extracted verses deployed to support his maverick theological vision. If it had any impact

on the Vednta world, it did not reach far beyond his own community until perhaps the

synthesizing efforts of Jva Gosvmin in the sixteenth century. Nevertheless, like Rmnuja

and his predecessor Ymuna (cf.gamaprmya), Madhva's attempt to establish parity

between the Veda and selected extra-Vedic traditions (Stoker 2004: 58) may also serve as

a precedent for the innovative exegetical moves we will study.

The next logical point of origin, then, should be the Bhvrthabodhinof rdhara

Svmin (14th-15th century), possibly the first extant commentary on the Bhgavata Pura,

written from an explicitly Advaita-inspired standpoint.60For someone with such a wide-

ranging impact on later exegetes of the Bhgavata, we know precious little about rdhara's

historical milieu. Indeed, the dissertation on rdhara himself is still waiting to be written:

was he an abbot at the Advaita monastery at Pur? whom did he directly influence and how?

where did his exegesis emerge from in the first place, clearly indebted to but detracting in

places from akara's Advaita?61 These are important questions, and, like his commentary,too vast for the scope of this project. I intend to approach rdhara selectively in this

chapter, in order to discern his link to the intellectual genealogy proposed below.

59 However, B.N.K. Sharma (1961 [2008]: 128) claims that Madhva was contending with powerfully establishedAdvaitic commentaries on the Pura. He makes reference to Jva Gosvmin's Tattvasandarbha (16th C.), whichmentions commentaries by the Advaitins Citsukha and Puyraya. Although these commentaries were longconsidered to have been lost (cf. Sheridan 1986: 118), Citsukha's commentary on theBhgavata has apparentlyresurfaced in the Adyar Library. (Jason Schwartz, personal communication, Dec. 21, 2012). Pending theavailability of this manuscript, this chapter may include a discussion of its contents.

60 On the dates, thought, and influence of the elusive but immensely important rdhara Svmin, cf. Gode 1954;Sheridan 1994; Gupta 2007: 65-84.

61 B.N.K. Sharma (1961 [2008]: 129) also claims that rdhara was influenced by some degree to Madhva, basedon a few citations we find shared between the two. It is not impossible, given that both Mdhva tradition andinscriptional evidence suggest that one Narahari Trtha, a Dvaita Vedntin, was minister at the Kalinga court inthe 13th-14th century. (Cf. Sharma 1961 [2008]: 226-8). More explicit and extensive links between Madhva andrdhara, however, remain to be excavated; until then Sharma's assertion, like much of the rest of his book, maywell be chalked up to his sectarian commitments.

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That genealogy, currently the subject of work by Jason Schwartz, unfolds not in

Orissa but Maharashtra. As Schwartz (2012) has recently discussed, the Bhgavata's

concept of bhakti itself likely owes a great deal to its aiva predecessors, in particular the

ivadharma corpus. While the Bhgavata has long been considered to have found its final

form in South India around the tenth century, it is quite possible that Maharashtra, as a site

of fluidity between aiva and Vaiava boundaries, may have contributed to this process of

Vaiavization. For around the thirteenth century, the Bhgavata finds new life in

Maharashtra.62As R.C. Dhere (tr. Feldhaus 2011) has shown in his magisterial history of the

folk god Vihal, the poet-saints of the Vrkari tradition, from Jnevar and Nmdev to

Eknth and Tukrm, interwove the exploits of Vihal, originally a deity who straddled the

lines between aiva and Vaiava, with that of the Bhgavata's beloved Krishna. But the

Bhgavata was also a source of inspiration for two prominent intellectuals at the court of

the Ydavas of Devagiri: Vopadeva and Hemdri, authors of the Muktphala and

Kaivalyadpik commentary on it, respectively.63 Vopadeva is more famous for his

grammatical work, the Mugdhabodha,64while Hemdri is well-known for his voluminous

work on dharmastra, the Caturvargacintmai .65 The Muktphala is more or less a

compilation of verses from the Bhgavata, interspersed with explanatory notes, and

organized into four sections, which address the object of religious affection (Viu), the

exalted status of devotion itself (bhakti), the material practices of worship (sdhana), andthe nature of the devotee (bhakta). The Muktphala, moreover, is generally discussed in the

context of being a precedent for the theory ofbhakti-rasa, the special category of religious

aesthetics introduced to the domain of Sanskrit poetics, later developed by the Gauya

62 This despite the laconic reference to Maharashtra in the famous passage from theBhgavata-Mhtmya in whicha personified bhakti details her travels through the subcontinent; cf. Hawley 2009: 82:

I was born in Dravida, grew mature in Karnataka,Went here and there (kvacit kvacin) in Maharashtra,

then in Gujarat became old and worn [...]63 TheMuktphala offers conflicting accounts of the authorship of the text; the introduction attributes the work to

Hemdri, while two verses at the end cite Vopadeva as the author. The commentary, however, specifies thatVopadeva, at Hemdri's behest, allowed the work to pass under the latter's name. Cf.Muktphala, p. vi.

64 Vopadeva is also author of theHarillrta, yet another selection of verses from theBhgavata, commentedupon by Madhusdana Sarasvat in the sixteenth century. Cf. Raghavan 1978.

65 It should be noted that the fifth section of Hemdri's text, theMuktikhaa, is no longer extant. This represents agreat loss for our purposes, since it is more than likely that it would tell us a great deal about Hemdri'sintellectual influences in the realm of soteriology.

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Vaiavas.66But the work is perhaps the first of its kind to offer a typology of bhakti and

its practitioner, specifically dedicated to Viu and directly adapted from the Bhgavata.

There is also an important tradition of premodern philological dispute, recognized from the

earliest scholarship on the Bhgavata Pura (eg. Burnouf 1840) which considers

Vopadeva, and not the compiler Vysa, to have been the author of the Bhgavata itself.67

Whatever the motivations behind these accusations, the memory of a Vaiava Bhgavata

taking shape in Maharashtra is one which should be taken seriously.

Forthcoming work by Schwartz discusses the intellectual context and the lasting

impact of these medieval Maharashtrians, Hemdri in particular, to whom prominent

scholarly families in early modern North India trace their intellectual debt, from Banaras to

Jaipur. My discussion in this chapter will thus be restricted to the connection of the

Muktphala and Kaivalyadpik to rdhara's Bhvrthabodhin, and their collective

influence on a fascinating yet virtually unstudied treatise, the Bhagavannmakaumud.

2.3 Mms in the Moonlight

The Bhagavannmakaumud(BNK), or the Moonlight of God's Name, was written

by an elusive Advaita Vedntin by the name of Lakmdhara, probably around the turn of

the fifteenth century.68Lakmdhara is also author of an unpublished commentary on the

Bhgavata titled theArtataragi,69but is more well-known for his lone Advaita Vednta

66 Cf. eg. Delmonico 1990: 164-170.67 Cf. Minkowski 2010.68 We know very little about the identity of Lakmdhara. His invocation of the god Vihal (puarkapriya) in an

opening verse to the BNK suggests a location of either the Kannada-speaking or Maharashtrian regions.However, Lakmdhara, like rdhara, may well have been a native of Orissa; he refers frequently to the god

Nsiha (also his father's name), and his influence on the Gauyas may owe to that geography. Chronologicalevidence points to an early fifteenth-century date. Minkowski (2011: 207) incorrectly identifies this Lakmdharawith Lakmdhara Kavi, who flourished at the court of Tirumalarya of Vijayanagara in the third quarter of thesixteenth century. (Cf. Mahadevan 1968: 202). Perhaps following a genealogy of Bhaoji Dkita provided bySarma (1980: 280), Minkowski (2011: 214-5) also assigns Lakmdhara to late sixteenth-century Banaras.However, in an article in theIndian Historical Quarterly on medieval Advaita teachers, Srikantha Sastri (1938:406) asserted that Lakmdhara was the son of one Singa, the sister of the famous brothers Syaa, Mdhava,and Bhogantha, and that he was probably identical with the patron of the Kannada poet Madhura in the time ofDeva Rya I (1406 A.D). Lakmdhara (or at least the advaitamakarandakra) is also quoted byBrahmnanda Bhrat (fl. 1425 CE) in his Vkyasudh commentary to theDgdyaviveka attributed toBhrattrtha, further favoring an early 15 th century date. Cf. Mahadevan 1968: 201-2; Sarma 1980: 266.

69 Cf. Raghavan 1968: 347b.

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treatise, a short versified text called theAdvaitamakaranda.70 Like the Muktphala, when

the BNK has found any scholarly mention, it is generally for its influence on the aesthetic

theories and theological doctrines promulgated by the Gauya Vaiavas.71Yet the text on

its own places much greater emphasis on arguing for the textual authority of the

Bhgavata, and thepuric corpus on the whole, in the hermeneutical language developed

by the Mms.

Particular attention is given to justifying the Bhgavata's claims regarding the

efficacy of singing God's name in the matter of dissolving sinsa stark rejection of the

normative penal jurisprudence ofdharmastra, a discourse which grounds itself in the

metalegal framework provided by Mms and its socialization of the ritual world.72 Much

of this controversy centers around the canonicity of the Bhgavata, indeed the entire genre

ofpura: to be precise, whether the authority of thepura should be equal, differential,

or inferior to that of the established Vedic textual hierarchy ofruti and smti.73This

debate not only illustrates the logical conclusion of the shifting notions of legitimation

between early and late-classical Mms, by which time the relative degrees of

authoritativeness between ruti and smti had become notably less defined, but also

discloses the obvious, but easily overlooked point that legitimation by nature emerges

from the competition and conflict over legitimacy.74

A similar case can be made for the BNK's Vednta concerns: namely, situating

70 TheAdvaitamakaranda appears to have been one of only two major Advaita texts from the fifteenth century tohave received subsequent commentarial attention. One of those commentaries belongs to VsudevaSrvabhauma, mentioned previously (see p. 13 above) as an instructor of some of the foremost early-modernexponents of Navya Nyya. The only record of Srvabhauma's k is Mitra 1886: 291-2 (no. 2854), which

provides the text's location (the akara maha at Pur), the opening and closing verses, and the colophon. Thisappears to be the only extant commentary on theAdvaitamakaranda prior to Svayapraka'sRasbhivyajikall the way in the seventeenth century. Although Srvabhauma likely wrote his commentary within a mere fiftyyears after the composition of the work, evincing the astonishing speed of manuscript transmission characteristicof the subcontinentwhat Sheldon Pollock calls script-mercantilism (Pollock 2006: 558)it has remainedunedited and unpublished, and thus represents yet another unfortunate lacuna in our understanding of theintellectual history of late medieval Advaita Vednta.

71 Cf. Delmonico 1990: 176-183; Broo 2009: 63. For an important exception, see Raghavan 2011: 49-55.72 Cf. McCrea 2010; Pollock 1990.73 One of the specific points of contention is whether or not the language of thepura should be considered

arthavda: that is, a particular kind of Vedic sentence, possessing a narrative or descriptive form, which ispurposeful only in a subordinate position to the overall ritual context, insofar as it serves to enhance or commendthe independently authoritative injunction. The locus classicus for this discursive topic is MS 1.2.1ff.

74 Cf. Pollock 2011b: 57, and n.30, which invokes Bourdieu 1977.

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puric religious practices alongside Vedntic philosophical ones. What is the role of

listening to God's glories, for example, in relation to listening to the Upaniads? Or how

might one understand the need to repeat God's name in light of analogous scholastic

discussions on the need for repeated Vednta study? While these issues may seem like

minor ones, philosophically speaking, the minutiae of the arguments reveal that the BNK's

concerns lie more with standards of textual interpretation and their social consequences. In

reconstructing these exegetical debates, Lakmdhara recognizes that there is something

radically new about the introduction of the BhgavataPura into the world of Mms

and Vednta. The questions for this chapter include: To whom was Lakmdhara

responding, and whom was he attempting to persuade? What clues does the text itself

provide to its historical context? And how do we classify this work in the first place, given

its own chequered career?75I argue in this chapter that, pending further understanding of

the medieval context of its origin, we should read the composition of the BNK as a turning

point in the historical intersections of Mms, Advaita Vednta, and Vaiava bhakti.

2.4 Vednta in the Moonlight

In keeping with the move from the crepuscular to the nocturnal, this chapter traces

the BNK's intellectual genealogy through the writings of an influential family of

Maharashtrian scholars living in early modern Banaras, the Devas: Anantadeva I (fl. 1580

CE), padeva II (fl. 1610 CE), and Anantadeva II (fl. 1650 CE). In a recent set of articles on

the social history of early modern India, Rosalind O'Hanlon has discussed the migration of

Maratha Brahmins into Banaras from the sixteenth century, in particular the prominent

pandit families of the Bhaas, Devas, eas, Puntmbekars, Caturdharas, and Bharadvjas.76

She describes their domination of the intellectual life of that city, and their ability to

75 The BNK manuscript in theDescriptive Catalogue of Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Tanjore Sarasvati MahalLibrary (Vol. XIV, No. 8237) is listed under Caitanya Vednta. In his initial catalogue of the Tanjoremanuscripts, A.C. Burnell (1880: 98a) listed it as a work of Viidvaita. Gosvmi Dmodar str, editor of thefirst printed edition of the BNK (1927), was quite explicit about his Mdhva background and the importance ofthis text to it. And finally, one narrative of the genesis of the Dakshina Bhajana Sampradya, the South Indiantradition ofpuric storytelling (harikath) and devotional worship through musical performance(nmasakrtana), points specifically to the BNK as a source; cf. Krishnamurthy 1979: 49-54; Raghavan 2011.

76 O'Hanlon and Minkowski 2008: 383, 395; O'Hanlon 2010: 203-4; 2011: 256.

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adjudicate public disputes of social hierarchy. O'Hanlon attempts to understand how the

changing social environment for Maratha Brahmins opened up the question of what it

meant to be a Brahman...and what Brahman community could signify amid the social

turbulence of the age.77 While these essays primarily address the broadening social

function of these Banarasi intellectuals within the context of the Mughal imperial order,

they also acknowledge as a necessary complement the study of the new intellectual trends

of those scholars.78One major intellectual trend, especially among these Brahmin families

from the Deccan, was to exhibit scholarly prowess in the fields of Mms79 and Advaita

Vednta.80 Yet no less explicit were their personal religious commitments, which deeply

affected their scholarly careers. While it may be the case that theistic mms produced

no systemwide change, no more than the conception ofbhaktirasa produced a systemwide

change in alakrastra,81the religious sensibilities of these individual scholars left an

unmistakable imprint on their intellectual writing. It is precisely reading their works which

allows us to question the systematicity of the system.82

In this chapter, I discuss the ways in which the Devas, across three generations,

situated their philosophical interest in Advaita Vednta (jna) against their pedagogical

commitment to the discipline of Mms (karma), and their religious devotion to a

personal god (bhakti). From Anantadeva I's commentary on the BNK to his grandson's

invocation of the vernacular poet-saint Eknth as a paternal ancestor, we follow themovement of bhakti in Sanskrit intellectual discourse from Maharashtra to Banaras.83 The

Devas' attempt to integrate their multiple intellectual identities also demonstrates that

early modern Advaita was in no way a monolithic entity, and had more internal fissions

than we might glean from its doxographical self-representation as an all-encompassing

philosophical umbrella. I hope to collect enough material in the course of my research for a

comprehensive historical bibliography of this important family of scholars.

77 O'Hanlon 2010: 238-9.78 O'Hanlon 2010: 202-3; 2011: 253.79 Cf. Pollock 2005: 40-63.80 Cf. Minkowski 2011: 216-18.81 Pollock 2005: 62.82 Ibid., 63.83 As previously suggested, however, this journey involves hazardous but significant detours to Orissa.

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2.5 Bhakti in the Moonlight

The lunar metaphor comes full circle in this chapter on the Bhakti-Stras of ilya,

read with a commentary by the seventeenth-century Advaita Vedntin Nryaa Trtha

called the Bhakticandrik (Moonlight of Bhakti). Although it is quite plain that the Bhakti-Stras model themselves on their Mms and Vednta predecessors, there have been

surprisingly few studies of their intellectual-historical context, little of which go beyond the

claim that the aphorisms date from around the turn of the first millennium, and are co-

extensive with the spread of popular bhakti throughout the subcontinent. This claim (or

rather, this guess) is largely based on: a) the Bhakti-Stras' conceptual proximity to the

Bhgavata Pura, b) the name of ilya as a recognized authority on devotional worship

(upsan) from the early Upaniads, and c) a supposed commentary on the aphorismsattributed to the Vidvaita theologian Rmnuja (11th C. CE).84 The first half of this

chapter will examine this claim in light of actually existing references to the Bhakti-Stras

prior to the early modern era, juxtaposed against the narrative that has built itself around

them. My suspicion is that these aphorisms are new entrants into a scholastic field

perhaps one very much like early modern Banaraswhich bristles at the thought of

bhakti occupying a theoretical space alongside jna and karma. Much of the

polemical literature authored by the Devas features colorful opponentsin particular,

crusty Mmsakas and haughty Vedntins; caricatural or not, these depictions reveal an

uneasiness arising from particular historical circumstances.

What those circumstances were remains to be seen, but I believe it is no accident

that the first extant commentaries we possess on the Bhakti-Stras date from the

seventeenth century. Not surprisingly, scholarly discussion of the exegetical tradition is

even more scant than of the aphorisms themselves. The works of Nryaa Trtha present

us with an opportunity to study the links between Mms, Advaita Vednta, and bhakti

with the greatest level of historical specificity. We know that he was a student and protg

of the famous Madhusdana Sarasvat, authored a commentary (Laghuvykhy) on his

teacher's Siddhntabindu, and directly quoted from the latter's Bhaktirasyana . The

84 The last of these, however, is a claim made in theBhakticandrik itself. Cf. ilya-Bhakti-Stra, pp. 30-33.

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Bhakticandrik also exhibits the influence of the BNK, most likely mediated through the

commentaries and treatises of the Devas.85 He appears to have gone farther than his

predecessors, however, in following the Bhakti-Stra's argument (1.19) regarding the

subordination of Vednta study to the attainment of bhakti. While this radical departure

from classical Vednta doctrine has been noticed previously, with specific reference to

Nryaa Trtha,86 the mechanics of the shift remain to be addressed. The second half of

this chapter will concentrate on elaborating the logic of Nryaa Trtha's exegesis, its place

in the intellectual genealogy drawn above, and its relationship to the other major

commentary on the Bhakti-Stra, written by his rough contemporary Svapnevara.

2.6 Conclusion

It is perhaps the singular burden of premodernists to have to situate their work with

reference to an imagined modern telos, as though being historically rigorous simply meant

that one tell a single story in more detail. The history of Advaita Vednta, however, is not

only not linear, but far from complete. A more comprehensive conclusion would go on to

address Vednta's transformations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and how

they refract the debates of the precolonial past. But there are enough questions about that

past which punctuate the present thesis, and which I cannot hope to address: What should

we make of the fraternal yet fractured relationship between Gauya Vaiavas and their

Advaita contemporaries, given the common set of intellectual resources upon which they

draw? How might these Sanskrit intellectual debates have been recast in, or perhaps

themselves formed by, their vernacular counterparts (eg. Rmcaritmnas of Tulsds)? Of

what sort were the links between Advaitins north and south of the Vindhyas; or, more

particularly, if the Advaitic bhakti of the BNK traveled along one genealogical route with

Maharashtrians to Banaras, how did it make its way back down to South India, as a

formative text for the Dakshina Bhajana Sampradya, the multilingual musical-performative

tradition which flourished under the patronage of the Maratha rulers of Thanjavur?87

85 See especially his comments on ilya-Bhakti-Stra 2.19-20.86 Cf. Mishra 1967: 235-8.87 Cf. Raghavan 2011 and n. 75 above.

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Whatever the answers to these questions, they will have greater bearing on our

understanding of the continuities and changes between Vedntas past and present than this

dissertation is equipped to offer. We may, however, suggest the following: far from melting

like so much snow in the light of a brilliant, pitiless sun,88the Vednta of precolonial India,

however drastically re-engineered, survived well beyond colonial modernity into the neo-

liberal postmodern. One might argue that, like other Sanskrit knowledge-systems

confronted with the order of colonial power-knowledge, Vednta no longer had the capacity

to make theory, to speak in a living language, to be anything but, in short, an inauthentic

shadow of its precolonial self.89 But the problem, if we even acknowledge it as such, is only

especially acute if we study Vednta as a philosophical instead of a hermeneutical

tradition. Vednta qua philosophy after the British was primarily the prerogative of

Indian academics (more well-versed in their Hegel than their Haribhadra) and popular

gurus, who attempted to make religion palatable both to an Indian middle-class fed on a

steady diet of Nehruvian secularism, and a Western audience in the thrall of the New Age. 90

Vednta as a tradition of historical memory, however, regards the old scholastic

controversies as current and vital; in this world, new challenges elicit new responses, just

as jna, karma, and bhakti must be reconciled time and again, in different ways.

There is a conservative way to read this work of tradition, amply available to

theologians and laypeople alike: viz. the valorization of essential, unchanging truths amidworldly vicissitudes. Yet it is precisely this historical Vedntaa Vednta in historywhich

defies crystallization into one or the other narrative, either frozen in metaphysical

quandaries or retouched as spiritual science, fashioned to serve dominant interests. If it is

true that some of the most radical thinkers of political modernity were also some of the

most vigorous readers of the past,91then premodern intellectual history may offer

something yet to an emancipatory politics.

88 Pollock 2001: 24.89 Cf. Halbfass 1995: 229-52.90 This need has since dissipated; as India shines for the few and plunges its majority in darkness, the new Hindu

elite and middle classes openly celebrate ritual ostentation and popular practices, often without the customarycerebral and philosophical apologetics offered by the neo-Vednta. Cf. Nanda 2009: 62

91 M.K. Gandhi and B.R. Ambedkar come to mind. Cf. Sawhney 2009: 86-124; Kumar 2010, esp. p. 392 onAmbedkar's insurgent and heterogeneous response to the unitary power of tradition to frame meaning.

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3. Schedule of Research

In the summer of 2013, I will travel to Oxford University to attend the next

conference of the Oxford Early Modern South Asia Project, organized by Chris Minkowski

and Polly O'Hanlon. In that time I also hope to procure relevant manuscripts from theBritish Library. For the year 2013-2014, I will complete as much research as is possible

with the texts currently in my possession, and present their fruits at various conferences

(Madison, AAR, AOS, AAS). I will travel to India for the summer of 2014, in order to obtain

the rest of the required manuscripts. I plan to finish the dissertation by May 2015.

4. Bibliography

Published Primary Texts

Advaitamakaranda of Lakmdhara with Rasbhivyajik of Svayapraka Yati. Ed. R.Krishnaswami Sastri, Srirangam 1926.

gamaprmya of Ymuna. Ed. Rama Misra Sastri, Varanasi 1937.Caturvargacintmai of Hemdri. Vols. I-IV. [Reprint]. Ed. Pandita Bharatacandra iromai,

Varanasi 1985.Tattvasandarbha of Jva Gosvmin. Ed. Haridasa Sastri, Vrindavan 1982.Tantraratna of Prthasrathi Mira. Ed. Ganganath Jha, Allahabad 1930.Dgdyaviveka of Bhrattrtha with Vkyasudh of Brahmnanda Bhrat. Ed. K. Achyut

Potwal, Thrippunithura n.d.Nryaya of Nryaa Bhaa with Bhaktapriy of Deamagala Varya. Ed. T. Ganapati

Sastri, Trivandrum 1912.The Bhakticandrikof Nryaa Trtha. Ed. Anant Shastri Phadke, Benares 1938.Bhaktiniraya of Anantadeva I. Ed. Ananta Shastri Phadke, Benares 1937.Bhaktirasrtasindhu of Rpa Gosvmin with Durgamasagamanof Jva Gosvmin. Ed.

Gosvami Damodar Sastri, K 1931.Bhaktirasyana of Madhusdana Sarasvat. Ed. Janardan Sastri Pandey, Varanasi 1962.BhaktisandarbhaBhagavannmakaumudof Lakmdhara with Vykhy of Anantadeva I. Ed. Gosvami

Damodar Sastri, K 1927.

Bhgavata Pura with Bhgavata-Ttparya-Niraya of Madhva and Bhgavata-Prakik of Yadupati crya. Ed. K.T. Pandurangi, Bangalore 1997.Bhgavata Pura with Bhvrthabodhinof rdhara Svmin. Ed. J.L. Shastri, Delhi 1983.Mano'nurajananaka of Anantadeva I. Ed. Mangal Deva Shastri, Allahabad 1938.Mmsdarana (Jaimini, abara, Kumrila). Ed. Vinayak Ganesh Apte, Pune 1929-34.Mms-Nyya-Praka of padeva II. Ed. Vasudev Shastri Abhyankar, Pune 1972.

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with Bhlakra of Anantadeva II. Ed. Lakshmana Sastri, Benares 1921.Muktphala of Vopadeva with Kaivalyadpik of Hemdri. Ed. Durgamohan Bhattacharyya,

Calcutta 1944.Vedntasra of Sadnanda with the commentaries of Nsihasarasvat and Rmatrtha. Ed.

Col. G.A. Jacob, Bombay 1934.

with Blabodhinof padeva II. Ed. J.K. Balasubrahmanyam, Srirangam 1911.ilya-Bhakti-Stra with Bhakticandrik of Nryaa Trtha. 2nd Edition. Ed. BaladevaUpadhyaya, Varanasi 1967.

rmadbhagavadgt with the commentaries rmatkarabhya with nandagiri;Nlakah(of Nlakaha Caturdhara); Bhyotkaradpik of Dhanapatisri;rdhar(of rdhara Svmin); Gtrthasagraha of Abhinavaguptchrya; andGrthadpik of Madhusdana [Sarasvat] with Ghrthatatvloka ofrdharmadattaarm. Ed. V.L.S. Pansikar, Bombay 1912.

Sakeparraka of Sarvajtman with Subodhinof Puruottama Sarasvat andAnvayrthaprakik of Rmatrtha. Ed. Hari Narayan Apte, Pune 1918.with Tattvabodhinof Nsihrama. Ed. Gopinath Kaviraj, Allahabad 1936.

Siddhntabindu of Madhusdana Sarasvat with two commentaries (NyyaratnvalofGaua Brahmnanda and Laghuvykhy of Nryaa Trtha). Ed.TryambakramSastri, Benares 1928.

Siddhntatattva of Anantadeva I. Ed. Rama Sastri Tailanga, Benares 1901.Sevaramms of Vednta Deika. Ed. Vachaspati Upadhyaya, Delhi 1981.Srtikaustubha of Anantadeva II. Ed. V.L.S. Pansikar, Bombay 1931.Harillmta of Vopadeva with commentary of Madhusdana Sarasvat. Ed. Parajuli Pandit

Devi Datta Upadhyaya, Benares 1933.

Unpublished Primary Texts

Amtataragiof Lakmdhara: Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, Madras, MSSno. 2795; Tanjore Sarasvati Mahal Library, MSS no. 8235.

Kakrkuthalry of Anantadeva I: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, no. 151of 1902-07.

Kabhakticandriknaka of Anantadeva I: Anup Sanskrit Library, nos. 3148, 3149;Government Oriental Library, Mysore, MSS no. C 1125.

Bhaktikalpataru of padeva II: Punjab University, Lahore, MSS no. 2431.Bhaktiata of Anantadeva I: British Library, no. 2521, 10 folios.Mathursetu of Anantadeva II: British Library, no. 3714, 46 folios.

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Mimamsa Vedanta b Hak Th i

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