Introduction

Tantra, Yoga, and Sufism in

the Historiography of Bhakti

A
defining feature of the Hindu religious world in early modern1 North
India was the emergence and rapid expansion of a diverse set of new
devotional (bhakti) communities united by their focus on an all-­
immersing love for and an unmediated personal relationship with the Divine.
This book seeks to understand the phenomenal rise of this bhakti religiosity in
North India, circa 1450–­1750. What about this bhakti was new and why was it so
successful at this particular time? How did early modern devotional communi-
ties define bhakti and themselves in relation to other religious approaches and
communities? To answer these questions, this book explores bhakti’s crucial and
historically shifting relationships with tantra, yoga, and asceticism over the
course of many centuries. Sultanate and Mughal India is the primary context
for this study, and thus the important role of Islam—­more specifically, Sufism—­in
the development of bhakti is also at the heart of this book. As I show, bhakti’s
multifaceted relationships with tantra, yoga, and Sufism are critical for an
understanding of historical events and processes in the religious landscape of
early modern North India.
Since the early twentieth century, the history of bhakti has generally been
told in terms of “the bhakti movement.” As typically conceived, the bhakti move-
ment was “a transformatory avalanche in terms of emotional devotion and
social reform” that began in Tamil South India between the sixth and ninth cen-
turies with the Śaiva Nāyanārs and Vaiṣṇava Ālvārs and gradually swept its
way across the subcontinent as a single, coherent movement.2 As A. K. Ramanu-
jan once put it, “Like a lit fuse, the passion of bhakti seems to spread from
region to region, from century to century, quickening the religious impulse.”3
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 2 9 Introduction

Appealing as they may be, such conceptions and their attendant metaphors (e.g.,
the passion of bhakti spreading like a lit fuse) have limited the historiography of
bhakti by (1) conceiving bhakti almost exclusively in terms of emotion and affect,
inattentive to its other varying community-­ and period-­specific meanings, and
(2) obscuring the actual means (discourses, embodied practices, institutions) by
which—­and the specific historical and regional contexts in which—­bhakti, as a
lived mode of religiosity, spread.
John Stratton Hawley, in A Storm of Songs (2015b), has brilliantly traced the
complex history of the idea of the bhakti movement, the notion that between
600 and 1600 a vernacular, grassroots, socially inclusive, emotional bhakti con-
nected and enlivened the culture of the entire Indian subcontinent, originat-
ing in the Tamil south, then making its way northward into Karnataka and
Andhra, next traveling to Maharashtra and Gujarat, and finally entering into
North India and Bengal.4 The recent (early twentieth-­century) term “bhakti
movement” (bhakti āndolan) and the (considerably older) narratives tied to it are
often central in popular understandings and nationalist tropes of Indian reli-
gious history; however, they are actually quite misleading in positing an illu-
sory historical continuity and coherence to the development of bhakti, while
glossing over significant qualitative differences in the form and style of bhakti
practiced in various regions and at different points in Indian history.5 We would
be better served to imagine that at different times, each of the various regions
of India had its own distinctive, multivocal bhakti movement shaped by region-
ally and historically specific social, political, and cultural factors.6
In the following pages, I refer to specifically early modern North India’s bhakti
movement using this convenient but imperfect term to denote the historical fact
that, beginning especially in the sixteenth century, a variety of bhakti commu-
nities emerged and rose to prominence in North India, different from and
competing with one another but sharing at least the following four key fea-
tures. First and foremost, these communities were united by a distinctive focus
on personal devotion to the Divine, as opposed to other traditional pillars of
Indic religiosity such as knowledge, ritual, or the practice of yoga or asceti-
cism. This devotion took place in the context of an intimate, loving relation-
ship with the Divine in which caste, class, or gender typically were said to have
no place. This was a bhakti that found its most characteristic expression in
(a) the context of spiritual fellowship (satsaṅg) with other devotees (bhaktas),
(b) the medium of song, (c) the idiom of passionate love (śṛṅgāra/mādhurya) or
painful separation (viraha), and (d) the remembrance—­in meditation, recitation,
chant, and song—­of the name(s) of God. Second, these new devotional commu-
nities of Mughal India7 were alike in their production and performance of devo-
tional works, composed in vernacular languages, remembering the deeds of
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 Introduction = 3

God (especially Kṛṣṇa and Rām) and exemplary bhaktas. Third, important in all
these communities was the performance and collection of songs attributed to
renowned bhakti poet-­saints like Kabīr, Raidās, and Sūrdās. Finally, despite
their many differences, the vast majority of bhakti authors and sectarian com-
munities in early modern North India came together in articulating a devo-
tional sensibility distinct from—­a nd often explicitly positioned in opposition
to—­certain tantric paradigms of religiosity. It is this last point about the rela-
tionship of bhakti to tantric religion to which scholars have drawn all too little
attention and that I therefore intend to highlight in what follows.
The religious landscape of early modern North India saw the rise of a “vul-
gate Vaiṣṇava” devotional tradition among Hindus at both the elite and pop-
ular levels.8 This was a catholic Vaiṣṇava religiosity that included yet extended
well beyond those affiliated with a Vaiṣṇava sampradāy (sect) and those whose
worship focused on one of the forms of Viṣṇu. Thus, whether as initiated
Vaiṣṇavas, worshippers of Rām or Kṛṣṇa with no clear institutional affiliation,
or devotees of a God conceived as being without form or attributes, Indians from
all social strata in Mughal India increasingly came to take on and participate
in a loosely Vaiṣṇava sensibility, a shared set of bhakti values articulated in a
Vaiṣṇava idiom utilizing the imagery, themes, myths, and names of Rām and
Kṛṣṇa.
Importantly, the rise of this vulgate Vaiṣṇavism was a phenomenon that often
occurred at the expense of tantric Śaiva and Śākta religion. In the new social and
political context that facilitated this change, an increasing number of Indians
were starting to conceive of (Vaiṣṇava) bhakti as a type of religiosity distinct from
and superior to (Śaiva-­Śākta) tantric religious forms. The religious literature of
this period brings to light a noticeable tension between, on the one hand, bhakti’s
shared ethical, emotional, and aesthetic orientation, and, on the other, the atti-
tudes and values of tantric yogīs and ascetics. Especially in devotional poetry and
hagiography, the bhakti approach of self-­surrendering, loving devotion to God is
regularly positioned in opposition to depictions of the self-­asserting, power-­
focused perspective of tantric religiosity. These representations were often cari-
catured, but they carried persuasive force nonetheless. A new and distinc-
tive bhakti sensibility was emerging among many Hindus in early modern
North India, an outlook and disposition formed in contradistinction to several
other religious modes but, perhaps most importantly, defined against the “other”
of the tāntrika. Importantly, this bhakti sensibility had distinctive Sufi “inflec-
tions.” The great rise of bhakti communities in Mughal India, then, was closely
intertwined with the growth of a new and Sufi-­inflected bhakti sensibility, itself
largely dependent upon the stigmatization and subordination of key aspects of
tantric religiosity.
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 4 9 Introduction

Rāmānandīs and Nāths

In order to explore the development of bhakti sensibilities and communities in

early modern North India, I focus on the Rāmānandī sampradāy at Galta in east-
ern Rajasthan. This Vaiṣṇava monastic community was pivotal in articulating
and propagating a catholic vision of bhakti that would, in many ways, come
to serve as a foundation for mainstream modern-­d ay Hinduism. The early
Rāmānandīs at Galta were an incredibly diverse array of practitioners, and a
study of them offers important insights into how a new bhakti sensibility
emerged out of the interwoven threads of devotion, yoga, tantra, and asceticism.
As the Rāmānandī community demonstrates, yoga and asceticism remained
important dimensions of the devotional life for many in the sixteenth century,
but a number of bhaktas at this time began to conceive their religious approach
as quite different from the tantric asceticism and magic represented most strik-
ingly and pervasively by the Nāth yogīs. The Nāths were an amorphous confed-
eration of tantric yogīs united by their roots in the Śaiva (Kaula) and Siddha
traditions and by a perspective oriented toward the attainment of siddhis
(magical abilities), worldly power, and bodily immortality. In much early mod-
ern bhakti literature, the Nāth yogī is the “tantric other” par excellence, a foil
against whom bhakti values and teachings are highlighted and defined. In fact,
however, the Nāth yogīs had quite a bit in common with devotee-­ascetics like the
Rāmānandīs. They were fellow participants and competitors in a common cul-
ture of charismatic asceticism and represented themselves (in part, at least) in
shared idioms of vernacular sainthood.
In examining bhakti portrayals of yogīs and tāntrikas, it is important to take
up Jon Keune’s admonition that we distinguish between “discursive others” and
“historical others” in bhakti sources.9 Bhakti authors often used alterity as a
teaching device, a pedagogical tool for effectively conveying particular devo-
tional messages, and we must not assume that their representations (of yogīs,
Śāktas, etc.) necessarily offer reliable historical information about those “oth-
ers.”10 Attending to the exaggerated, stereotyped “pedagogical otherness” of
Nāth yogīs in bhakti texts will prevent us from misunderstanding the historical
realities of Nāth religiosity, but it will also help us to see how bhakti authors (and
presumably to some extent their audiences) perceived themselves and their reli-
giosity as being meaningfully different from tantric yogīs like the Nāths and
their religiosity. In exploring how devotional communities like the Rāmānandīs
differed from and criticized the Nāths, yet also shared much in common with
them, I show how broad social, political, and cultural changes in early modern
North India manifested themselves in the religious landscape, particularly in
terms of shifts in the perceptions, representations, and social positions of bhakti
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 Introduction = 5

and tantra. By comparing and contrasting the Nāth yogīs and the Rāmānandī
bhaktas, this study seeks to bridge important gaps that separate the study of
Bhakti, Tantra, and Yoga in the field of South Asian religious studies, interro-
gating the crucial historical relationships that weave together these seemingly
different genres of religiosity.11

Approaches to Bhakti in South Asian Studies

Bhakti is most often translated as “devotion,” a word with a wide range of con-
notations, many of them Protestant Christian. If bhakti has, on the one hand,
been vaguely characterized as a mode of personal devotion, on the other hand
it has often (rather problematically) been described as a social movement seek-
ing egalitarian social change while protesting empty and excessive ritual, blind
adherence to orthodoxy, and caste discrimination.12 In either case, scholarly cat-
egorizations of bhakti almost always invoke a distinction between nirguṇ and
saguṇ modes and traditions of bhakti. The term nirguṇ refers to the concept of a
Divine without (nir) attributes (guṇ) or form, ultimately inconceivable, and acces-
sible mainly through an individual’s cultivation of purified perception and
inner experience, whereas the term saguṇ denotes the notion of a Divine in form
and with (sa) attributes (guṇ), accessible within the realm of sensory experi-
ence.13 As Krishna Sharma has pointed out, our modern-­d ay conceptions of
bhakti as “devotion,” whether nirguṇ or saguṇ, are heavily influenced—­a nd
distorted—­by the Protestant Christian disposition of the Orientalist scholars
(European Indologists, British colonial officials, etc.) who described bhakti as a
type of Hindu religion.14
In recent years, a number of scholars have sought to counter this bias and to
expand our conceptions of bhakti in several different ways. In the view of Karen
Pechilis, “Academic discussions of bhakti that focus on the image of God, includ-
ing monotheism and nirguṇa and saguṇa, and those that focus on social move-
ments, including reform, revolution, and revival, tend to obstruct scholarly
recognition of the pattern of concern with embodiment common to bhakti’s
proponents and interpreters.”15 Pechilis’s scholarship presents bhakti as a his-
tory of active, embodied devotional engagements, an approach complemented
by the work of Barbara Holdrege, who also emphasizes the crucial place of
embodiment in bhakti traditions, both in their lived devotional practices and
their proliferating constructions of divine embodiment (in which an abstract,
translocal Divine takes localized, particular, material—­even corporeal—­forms).
Holdrege highlights “the oral-­aural and performative dimensions of devotional
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 6 9 Introduction

practices,” stressing that the core practices of bhakti “are embodied practices—­
practices through which the bodies of bhaktas engage the embodied forms of
the deity.”16
Christian Novetzke has also pushed for a reconceptualization of bhakti but
takes a different approach, emphasizing the intrinsic sociality of bhakti. Novetzke
argues that the category of bhakti should be understood neither as a social move-
ment nor as a kind of personal devotion “but, rather, as an ongoing effort to
construct publics of belief, maintained through intricate systems of memory.”17
He states that “all manifestations of bhakti are performances” that take part in
and help to form “publics of reception,”18 social entities created through the
reflexive circulation of bhakti discourse among diverse individuals and made
coherent by “the metaphorical sharing of a common object, the object of devo-
tional fervor.”19 Seeking a middle path between the extremes of bhakti as per-
sonal devotion and as a social movement, Novetzke argues that “bhakti connects
the personal and the social, linking an individual to a shared social moral order
(dharma).”20 While the individual is “the essential node of creation and trans-
mission,” bhakti only really manifests itself when “ideas, materials, and memo-
ries circulate among individuals” and thereby form publics of reception.21 Here
bhakti is conceived as inherently social; it is a shared flow of sentiment and mem-
ory circulating between poet-­performer, audience, and God that generates an
interactive devotional community or public. Along similar lines, John Stratton
Hawley has remarked that, at the level of the individual, when it comes to bhakti,
“What matters is the heartfelt, intrinsically social sense of connectedness that
emerges in the worshipper.”22 Hawley conceives of bhakti as a far-­reaching
network—­or, really, “a complex network of networks”—­connecting people and
places across regional, linguistic, and social boundaries through shared narra-
tives, poetic genres and forms, and tropes (e.g., humility, love in separation, etc.).
Looking out upon the vast history of bhakti traditions, he sees a “crazy quilt” of
overlapping memories and multidirectional exchanges between different
regions and social classes, a common, musical “bhakti grid” along which poems,
poets, stories, and motifs circulate, interconnect, and often manifest themselves
at more than one point.23
A central feature of scholarly attempts to conceive bhakti in more accurate
and sophisticated terms—­and to displace Protestant-­biased notions of “devo-
tion to a personal god”—­has been attention to (and emphasis on) the etymol-
ogy of the word bhakti and the crucial associations its root, bhaj-­, has with
notions of “sharing” and “participation.” As Hawley writes, “bhakti means devo-
tion not in the sense of cool, measured veneration, but as active participation:
the word bhakti derives from a Sanskrit root meaning ‘to share.’ ”24 Similarly,

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Pechilis has sought to reframe scholarly discussions of bhakti “from its static
definition of ‘devotion’ to a multidimensional characterization of it as ‘devo-
tional participation.’ ”25 She argues that the most fundamental thesis of bhakti
is that an embodied “engagement with (or participation in) God should inform
all of one’s activities” and experiences in life.26 For Pechilis, the agency of the
bhakti poets in their vernacular works is a crucial feature of bhakti religiosity
in general: devotees actively participate in distinctive personal relationships
with the Divine that are colored by their own language, geographical and socio-
historical setting, personal experience, etc., and that involve an emotional
commitment through which “they are making God theirs.”27
While attention to bhakti’s Sanskrit root (and its links to “sharing” and “par-
ticipation”) nuances our understanding of its meaning, John Cort has ques-
tioned too great an emphasis on bhakti’s etymology. As he argues, “We need to
move beyond the standard academic definition of bhakti with its concern for the
derivation of bhakti from notions of sharing and ontological interpenetration. . . . ​
Etymology does not tell us how a concept is understood in its actual usage.”28
Rather, Cort suggests we pay attention to the way diverse South Asian bhaktas—­
Vaiṣṇavas, Śaivas, Śāktas, Sants, Jains, Buddhists, and others—­have understood
bhakti, an approach that reveals it to be “a highly complex, multiform cultural
category.” As he explains, “Bhakti is both something that one does and an atti-
tude that can suffuse all of one’s actions. Bhakti can range from sober respect
and veneration that upholds socioreligious hierarchies and distinctions to fer-
vent emotional enthusiasm that breaks down all such hierarchies and distinc-
tions in a radical soteriological egalitarianism. Bhakti is not one single thing.”29
Relatedly, Kumkum Sangari has remarked, “The ideological diversity and con-
tradictory locations of bhakti are startling,” arguing that bhakti is “a product
and partaker of a changing society,” able to either assist or resist particular
hierarchical, patriarchal, and feudal relations and “can neither be understood
solely in terms of its social content and ideology, nor evaluated separately from
the social practices in which it is implicated.”30 Krishna Sharma has also stressed
how bhakti cannot be understood as a “uniform set of ideas or beliefs” or “a
specific religious mode” with any common ideology, while emphasizing how
scholarship has often falsely opposed bhakti to jñāna (knowledge), when in fact
the two have been closely intertwined through much of Indian religious his-
tory.31 For all these reasons, Jon Keune rightly suggests that in our attempts to
understand Indian history, the term bhakti can obscure more than it reveals,
since modern references to bhakti “tend to be historiographically over-­burdened,
neglectful of how the term was reshaped over time.”32 As Keune remarks, “The
term [bhakti] has taken on a deceptive aura of familiarity, although its precise

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 8 9 Introduction

definition is vitally rooted in the contexts in which it is used. These contexts

(inflected by language, tradition, social location, and historical period) differ
significantly from one another and exhibit a wide range of socio-­political
dynamics.”33 Keune, Sangari, Sharma, and Cort remind us of the multiplicity of
bhakti’s lived forms, the diversity of its historical expressions, and thus the cor-
responding caution and care required in deploying the term.
With this in mind, rather than seeking to understand bhakti in terms of cer-
tain intrinsic qualities one may suppose it to possess, I propose to approach
bhakti on the basis of its historically specific relationships with other key con-
cepts, traditions, and institutions in the broader South Asian social and religious
world. In other words, considering bhakti’s varying contextually rooted mean-
ings it may be especially productive to approach the term relationally. To para-
phrase Douglas Renfrew Brooks, whose methodological approach to discussing
tantra somewhat mirrors my own to bhakti, since any general attributes that
would seem to define bhakti are part of larger, context-­specific networks of social
and religious relations in India, we can productively approach bhakti by seek-
ing to understand the “oppositional social, political, and religious relations and
structures” that help constitute it.34 While the field of relationships in which
bhakti is situated at any given historical moment is infinitely complex, I argue
that we can learn much by seeking to understand bhakti in terms of its crucial
but historically shifting relationships with, specifically, tantra and yoga.
The work of the scholars mentioned here—­Hawley, Novetzke, Pechilis, Hold-
rege, Sangari, Sharma, Cort, and Keune, among others—­represents an important
shift in focus that has allowed scholars to highlight networks of interrelation and
community among devotees, dimensions of memory, performance, embodiment,
and emotional involvement in devotional participation, the diversity of forms
and styles bhakti can take in different traditions and social locations, and the role
of region-­specific languages, sacred sites, and saints in the embodied life of devo-
tion, all of which are crucial components of bhakti religiosity not adequately
accounted for in the earlier Orientalist, Protestant-­biased conceptions of bhakti
as devotion to a personal god. This work has undoubtedly been a very positive
development in our understanding of bhakti. Still, conceptions of bhakti have con-
sistently continued to neglect tantric, yogic, and ascetic dimensions of its history
and practice, fostering lines of separation that, historically speaking, simply did
not exist—­at least not before the early modern period—­between bhakti and other
“categories” of Indic religiosity.35 A critical exploration of bhakti’s vital but inad-
equately understood links to and interpenetrations with tantra, yoga, and ascet-
icism is thus at the very heart of this book.

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 Introduction = 9

Bhaktas, Ascetics, and Monasteries

Odd as it may seem, to provide a satisfying history of bhakti it is necessary to

reflect on the history of asceticism in India—­more specifically, India’s ascetic
lineages (parampara) and monastic institutions (maṭhas). The close relationship
between bhakti and asceticism has rarely received the scholarly attention it
deserves, in large part because the two are commonly seen as polar opposites.
In the eyes of many scholars and Hindus alike, as John Carman puts it, “When
passionate attachment to the Lord is stressed, bhakti is a striking contrast to
yoga and other ascetic paths to salvation that stress detachment and the over-
coming of all passions, positive as well as negative.”36 Jessica Frazier has also
noted how “the renunciatory, inward-­facing, dispassionate practice of yoga” is
regularly perceived “as a diametrically opposed state to the communal, sense-­
rich, passionate practice of popular bhakti,” yet she points out that in fact “the
dichotomization of yogic dispassion and ascetic lifestyle from theistic devotion
is ill-­g rounded.”37 Along these lines, Timothy Dobe has critiqued the schol-
arly tendency to define bhakti as “inner devotion” or “love” and thus “to pres-
ent bhaktas (devotees) as anything but ascetics,” when in many cases “bhakti cul-
tivates and is cultivated by embodied practices and rigorous, bodily discipline—­in
other words, through asceticism.”38 Contrary to what some would assume,
throughout bhakti’s history, asceticism and ascetics (and relatedly, yoga and
yogīs) have actually been crucial elements in the life of devotion. The paradox
I explore—­provocatively articulated in John Stratton Hawley’s essay “Asceti-
cism Denounced and Embraced” (1983)—­is that, on the one hand, early modern
North Indian bhakti literature regularly disparages renouncers, monastics,
and yogīs while, on the other hand, when we look beyond this rhetoric to
social realities, we find that professional asceticism and monastic institutions
have been and still are important aspects of nearly every North Indian bhakti
tradition.39
This book shows the ways in which, through most of Indian religious history,
asceticism and yoga have been closely intertwined with bhakti, on both the level
of personal practice (i.e., the ascetic qualities of devotional praxis) and the level
of social and institutional interactions (i.e., relations between communities of
devotee-­adherents and monks/yogīs). In the latter respect, I am particularly con-
cerned with the figure of the professional ascetic—­the religious adept (usually
but not necessarily a monk or yogī) who somehow in terms of spiritual commit-
ment and authority sets himself apart from the rest of society. The lay popu-
lace has often looked upon such a figure as an ideal of spiritual achievement and
power. Regardless of the religious tradition or sectarian context, these profes-
sional ascetics were crucial in everyday lay religious life as objects of devotion,
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 10 9 Introduction

as service providers (in temple worship, healing, protection, and well beyond),
as spiritual guides and teachers (of doctrine, ethics, religious narratives), and
as recipients (individually or on behalf of their monastic institutions) of gifts
and patronage, in exchange for which they offered spiritual merit, cultural
capital, and the teachings and ritual services alluded to here.
This brings us to the role of the monastery, or maṭha. In order to arrive at a
more sophisticated understanding of the historical relationship between bhakti
and asceticism—­a nd, importantly, also the ways that bhakti communities and
ascetic orders influenced and were influenced by the larger social order and po-
litical economy—­it is imperative we attend to the maṭha. Between the eighth
and twelfth centuries, sectarian ascetic orders rose in prominence and their
monasteries came to dot the landscape of the entire Indian subcontinent. In the
early modern period, the presence and sociopolitical role of maṭhas and their
Sufi counterparts continued to expand. As the work of Indrani Chatterjee,
Tamara Sears, and Valerie Stoker, among others, has highlighted, monastic
teachers and their institutions across traditions—­Buddhist, Śaiva, Vaiṣṇava,
Sufi, Jain—­were central to the political and economic order in premodern India.40
They engaged with and connected political elites and diverse local lay popula-
tions (often acting—­symbolically or practically—­as instruments of the court’s
authority) and served as key nodes in networks of pilgrimage, trade, military
movement, and textual-­ideological transmission. As Chatterjee puts it, “These
teachers and their disciples, students, and adherents constituted a basic unit of
political society in precolonial India.” 41 Whatever their sectarian differences in
ideology and ritual practice, maṭhas across the Indian subcontinent were simi-
larly organized and administered and served similar religious, economic, and
political functions, thus certain shared (translocal, transsectarian) forms of
social organization—­a nd shared idioms of ascetic sainthood and power—­rose
around them, facilitating shared religious worlds.
In the pages that follow, as I trace shifts in the historical relationships
between bhakti, tantra, and yoga I will show the continuity of monasticism as a
South Asian institution—­w ith great social, political, economic, and religious
importance—­over the longue durée, while also attending to important histori-
cal changes by means of which certain powerful monastic lineages and ascetic
orders withered and new ones emerged. These changes were caused by newly
arising popular religious currents, new forms of political organization, an
expanding military labor market, and the shifting socioeconomic positions of
key segments of the lay population. While attending to the significant ways in
which ascetic lineages (Śaiva Siddhāntins, Nāths, Rāmānandīs, etc.) differed in
their religious outlooks and sensibilities, their social makeups, and their levels
of involvement with state power, it is important to notice the crucial ways that
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 Introduction = 11

all their monastic institutions shaped popular religious life by producing reli-
gious literature (philosophical, ritual, poetic, and hagiographical works), collect-
ing and transmitting manuscripts, teaching, and facilitating popular devotional
and ritual activities. At the same time, their own sustenance and success were
fundamentally dependent upon—­even parasitic in relation to—­communities of
lay adherents. The Rāmānandī lineage and its maṭha at Galta offer us an opportu-
nity to explore the ways in which, even as bhakti songs critical of yogīs and ascet-
ics circulated throughout early modern North India, monastic institutions were
crucial in the growth of the bhakti public, particularly in their production and
transmission of devotional literature and their relationships with state power.

Bhakti and Tantra

If most scholars have not adequately considered the interrelations of bhakti,

asceticism, yoga, and tantric practice, enduring Protestant biases (regarding
bhakti as “devotion”) are partly to blame, but there is another crucial factor at
play. In the early modern period, bhakti traditions themselves began to conceive
their identity and practice in increasingly exclusive terms, which often opposed
or marginalized dimensions of tantric and yogic religious modes that previously
had regularly interfused with devotional practice. This book explores this piv-
otal historical moment in North India and its impact on modern-­d ay under-
standings of bhakti and tantra.
In the late Sultanate and Mughal periods, a major historical change was tak-
ing place in North India’s religious landscape as a new bhakti sensibility emerged
and came to be shared among a diverse array of bhakti communities. This bhakti
disposition and outlook was formed and performed by devotional poets and
singers whose works often artfully deprecated or co-­opted other modes of Hindu
religiosity, especially aspects of tantra and yoga. We find bhakti compositions
criticizing, marginalizing, and satirizing tantric yogīs—­and tantric or yogic reli-
giosity more broadly—­in manuscript sources from throughout the late six-
teenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries and in places stretching across
northern and central India and into Maharashtra (to the south) and Bengal and
Assam (to the east) as well.
In the following pages, sometimes this “anti-­tantric, anti-­yogī” perspective
will be seen as an implicit element of didactic devotional verses encouraging
their audience to take up a certain ethical and religious life (different from that
espoused in tantric yogī circles), but it will also be revealed as a rather explicit
polemical position articulated by bhakti “insiders” and “ideologues” against
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their opponent competitors. While these anti-­tantric, anti-­yogī perspectives in

bhakti compositions would certainly have had influence on the members of their
bhakti publics, it is not entirely clear to what extent they, or the larger popu-
lace of Mughal India, would have shared the perception of tantric religiosity
found in this bhakti discourse. Nevertheless, as I discuss in the conclusion, the
evidence clearly suggests that, over time, the devotional perspective expressed
in early modern North Indian Hindu bhakti literature significantly influenced
(and continues to color) mainstream attitudes toward “tantra” in modern India.
While tantric notions and practices are actually ubiquitous in India today, they
are seldom identified as “tantric,” since many modern Indians regard “tantra”
as a disreputable sphere of hocus-­pocus trickery or a secretive, sinister realm
of dark power. Widely held (though far from universal) among Indians today,
negative perceptions of “tantra”—­often paired with generally positive under-
standings of bhakti as good, wholesome religion—­a re usually attributed to the
influence of the British and Protestant Christian Orientalist scholars, missionar-
ies, and colonial administrators. Yet as I show, in the early modern bhakti litera-
ture of Mughal North India and its critiques of tantric religiosity we can see an
important precolonial, indigenous basis for such modern Indian religious per-
spectives. While the British certainly exaggerated and added new dimensions to
a particular view of (and distinction between) bhakti and tantra, the origins of
prevalent modern-­day North Indian understandings of these two genres of reli-
giosity lie squarely in the early modern flourishing of North India’s bhakti move-
ment, circa 1500 to 1700—­well before the British had any significant presence.

Persianate Culture, Sufism, and Bhakti

Unorthodox, transgressive ascetics had almost always been marginalized by the

religious mainstream in South Asia (e.g., the skull-­carrying, cremation-­ground-­
frequenting Kāpālika is often mocked in medieval Sanskrit dramas),42 but in
early modern North India we see a far broader critique of tāntrikas, ascetics, and
yogīs of all stripes, one that takes on a new and bhakti-­centered tenor. Why does
this happen at this particular time? And what exactly was new and distinctive
about this early modern North Indian bhakti perspective? These are big ques-
tions that I explore over the course of this work, but at this juncture we can say
that much of the timing of this historical development and much of the nature
of this new devotional sensibility had to do with the increasingly powerful
and pervasive presence of Sufi popular religiosity and Persianate political and
aesthetic traditions in North India after the thirteenth century.
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As noted earlier, scholarship on bhakti has all too rarely taken tantric religi-
osity into full consideration, and, until quite recently, it can also be faulted for
its generally inadequate treatment of the role and influence of Islam and Per-
sian culture. Sufism and Persianate literary and political culture were crucial
factors in the rise of bhakti in early modern North India. As I discuss in chap-
ter 2, the Central Asian Turks who took control of vast swaths of northern and
central India in the thirteenth century brought with them the cosmopolitan cul-
ture of “the Persian cosmopolis,” to use Richard Eaton and Phillip Wagoner’s
term, and its moral, aesthetic, and sociopolitical forms and norms.43 The grad-
ual spread of Persianate sensibilities and institutions—­a nd the complex inter-
actions between the Sanskritic and Persian literary-­cultural systems—­have not
often been addressed in historical studies of bhakti, yet it is clear that they were
crucial factors in early modern North India’s bhakti movement. Following Eaton
and Wagoner, this book seeks to move beyond the narrow and inaccurate frame
of “Hindu-­Muslim” encounter to one that sees the Sultanate and Mughal peri-
ods in terms of an often fruitful encounter between Sanskrit and Persian
literary-­political systems or, even more broadly, an interaction of Indic and Per-
sianate cultural traditions. If my focus here is nevertheless on “religion”—­on
bhakti, tantra, yoga, and Sufism—­it is with the understanding that it is ultimately
impossible to separate the “religious” from the intertwined social, political, eth-
ical, and aesthetic aspects of this larger cultural encounter.
One of my key concerns in this book is with the complex relationship of Islam
and specifically Sufism to bhakti in Sultanate and Mughal India. Aditya Behl has
stated that, in representations of bhakti in history, “the greatest gap or silence
is the role of Islam and Islamic religiosity in the formation of the bhakti move-
ment.” 44 Similarly, Vasudha Dalmia and Munis Faruqui have noted that despite
the fact that “the Mughal period can be seen as the golden age of bhakti litera-
ture in the many vernacular traditions of the subcontinent,” in contemporary
scholarship, rarely “are bhakti and Muslim religious formations considered
together, let alone as acting positively upon each other.” 45 Dalmia and Faruqui
blame this lacuna especially upon scholars such as Ramchandra Shukla (1884–­
1941), who, biased in part by “Orientalist scholarship with its mistrust of Islam,”
presented “the emergence of the bhakti movement (in the singular) as a direct
reaction to the alien Muslim presence on the subcontinent and the sense of
despair and inwardness (udasi) that Muslim political dominance occasioned in
Hindus at large.” 46 Entrenched historiographical perspectives such as this have
too long obstructed both popular and scholarly understandings of bhakti. In fact,
there should be no doubt that the rise of bhakti in early modern North India was,
as Behl writes, “an intensely interactive and plural affair, with genealogies that
have to include Islam in an historically complex way.” 47
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Recent work by scholars such as Behl, Francesca Orsini, Tony Stewart, and
Thomas de Bruijn, among others, has highlighted the South Asian Sufi tradi-
tion’s critical interconnections with and influences upon bhakti literature,
performance, and community.48 Drawing on and contributing further to this
scholarship, this book highlights how early modern bhakti discourse resonates
with (and was likely influenced by) Islamic literary and hagiographical tropes
as well as Sufi conceptions regarding the nature of God and the proper rela-
tionship between humans and the Divine. As I show, Indian Sufi hagiographies
and premākhyān (love story) literature display specific religious perspectives
and literary strategies—­even particular metaphors and narrative motifs—­that
bhakti authors adopt in their own writings and that marginalize tantric-­yogic
goals, attitudes, and approaches while exalting the power of selfless love and
humble devotion. It is for these reasons that throughout the book I refer to the
bhakti sensibility of early modern North India as “Sufi inflected.”
Given the incredible diversity in types of Sufis, just what do I mean by “Sufi
­inflected”? Early modern India was home to a vast array of Sufi initiates who
might have been any (or a mix) of the following: establishment Sufis advocat-
ing strict Islamic orthodoxy; antiestablishment Sufi dervishes seeking spiritual
ecstasy; Sufi literati (authors of Sufi mystical or popular literature); militant,
warrior Sufis; wealthy, landowning Sufi political elites; or poor, yoga-­practicing
Sufi ascetics. As Eaton has remarked, “it is simply not possible to generalize
about the Sufis [of India] . . . a​ s any unitary group relating in any single or pre-
dictable way to the society in which they lived. They clearly played a variety of
social roles.” 49 The bhakti sensibility of early modern India that I describe was
inflected most especially by the values of typically sedentary Sufi literati and
their idioms of love and devotion, but certainly also by the perspectives of ascetic
Sufi dervishes, who not infrequently composed literature themselves. I have nei-
ther orthodox (‘ulamā-­associated) Sufis nor warrior Sufis in mind here; rather,
it is the ethical principles, aesthetic understandings, and emotional values of
Sufi literati and contemplative mystics—­particularly (though not exclusively)
those of the Chishti order—­that seem to have inflected expressions of early mod-
ern North Indian bhakti in important ways.
In seeking to illuminate aspects of Sufi and Persianate contributions to North
India’s bhakti movement, I draw attention to a simple but critical fact: the advent
and eventual military-­political dominance of Persianized Turks in North India
was, in important respects, just as disruptive to existing Indian religious and
political paradigms and just as profoundly generative of new forms of Indian
thought and practice as when the British came to dominate India in the late-­
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this book I seek to counter a scholarly
emphasis on British colonial impact that has sometimes led to the occlusion of
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important continuities between premodern and modern Indian perspectives,

especially perceptions of bhakti and tantra. Colonialism obviously occasioned
real and important “ruptures” in India, but I wish to shift attention to the
more distant yet equally important historical shifts brought about by the mili-
tary and political conquest of northern and central India by Central Asian
Turks and the subsequent penetration of Persianate cultural forms and Islamic
perspectives. It was largely in response to and productive interaction with this
new Persianate and Islamic presence that many of the unique features of North
India’s bhakti movement emerged.

Theoretical Frames: Bhakti as a Public,

Bhakti as a Sensibility

In analyzing this process—­a set of changes specific to South Asian religious his-
tory—­I also engage three big-­picture intellectual questions of great interest
across the humanities and social sciences. The first of these questions is, What
happens in the encounter of different traditions and cultures? For our specific
purposes, what happens in the encounter between Persianate/Islamicate and
Sanskritic/Indic traditions? My approach here largely follows that of Finbarr
Barry Flood, in that I frame this historical encounter as a multidirectional
exchange, “a complex process of transformation unfolding through extended
contact between cultures.”50 Acknowledging that prior to their encounter, Per-
sianate and Indic cultures were “always already hybrid and in process,” I under-
stand the transculturation process that occurred in Sultanate and Mughal
India as one that took place “both between and within cultural codes, forms,
and practices.”51 While Persianate and Sanskritic cultures resonated in impor-
tant ways, they were fundamentally different. This difference was not constant
or stable but rather a product of ongoing negotiations, a difference we should
conceive of as “dynamic in its emphases, contingent in its expression, and vari-
able in its meaning.”52
This brings us to a second broad question taken up by this book: historically,
how does a social group’s “worldview” change? As I use it here, the term “world-
view” is not meant to denote an intellectual, cognitive frame in the minds of
individuals so much as a way of perceiving and understanding the world that is
embodied in sentiments, habits, physical practices, and social institutions. In
terms of this case study, how and why does the worldview characterizing
medieval India’s Tantric Age—­its religious attitudes, ethical understandings,
and cosmological conceptions—­give way among many social groups to an early
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 16 9 Introduction

modern bhakti sensibility in which certain tantric approaches and perspec-

tives, once taken for granted, become increasingly questioned or marginal-
ized? The historical shifts in worldview that this book explores are insepa-
rable from changes in political economy, the growth of new communities, the
rise of new discursive forms, and the emergence of new embodied sensibilities
in Sultanate and Mughal India.
This brings us to a third set of big questions that lie at the heart of this book:
How do communities form and grow? How are ideas transmitted and what are
the limits of their diffusion? How do group sensibilities change? Within the con-
fines of this study, how does a transregional, transsectarian North Indian
bhakti public develop? How do its ideas and values spread and lead to shifts in
identity and sensibility? In order to address these questions and conceptualize
the emergence of a broad bhakti social formation in early modern North India,
I draw upon the work of an array of scholars who have productively theorized
the nature of social groups and the process of community formation, particu-
larly the crucial roles of discourse, aesthetics, emotion, and ethics in forming
social bodies.
Like Christian Novetzke, I find Michael Warner’s notion of “publics” useful
in thinking about bhakti and the kind of expansive, participatory social entity
that emerged in association with it in early modern North India. While Warner
and most other scholars have understood publics as exclusively modern phe-
nomena, Novetzke’s creative and original treatment of bhakti as public demon-
strates the value of applying the concept in the premodern sphere.53 In Warner’s
sense, a public is a social entity that comes into being in relation to discourse
and its circulation; it is different from a crowd, audience, or group in that it is
a community embracing otherwise unrelated people who all participate in the
same discourse at different times and places.54 As Warner states, “Publics do not
exist apart from the discourse that addresses them.”55 The discourse of bhakti
is one of poetry and narrative (about the gods and saints), and in early modern
North India this bhakti discourse—­these devotional poems and stories—­were
performed; they were sung. Put simply, bhakti “discourse” was bhakti song, and
to participate in bhakti discourse—­a nd thus to be a part of the bhakti public—­
was to sing or hear (or, much less often, read) bhakti’s circulating stories and
songs. From the mid-­sixteenth century on in North India an array of more
tightly bounded bhakti sects (sampradāys) and institutions emerged within the
larger embrace of the bhakti public. The distinct bhakti sectarian communities
that proliferated at this time differed from one another in specific doctrines and
practices and competed with each other for support, but all looked outward
toward the larger social sphere of the early modern North Indian bhakti public,

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 Introduction = 17

a transregional community of belonging and participation limited only by the

constraints of bhakti’s circulation in performance and text.
Warner posits that a public’s members understand themselves as directly and
actively belonging to a social entity that exists historically and has conscious-
ness of itself. 56 In similar fashion, I argue that the bhaktas of Sultanate and
Mughal India, whatever their sectarian affiliation(s), if any, may not have shared
a common religious identity, or even a uniform social ideology, but did share a
common sensibility and thus, in some sense, understood themselves as actively
belonging to a larger “imagined community” sharing that particular aes-
thetic, emotional, and ethical disposition. Throughout this book, I frame the
history of North India’s bhakti movement as the growth of a transregional,
transsectarian bhakti sensibility. By this, I am suggesting the emergence of an
expansive bhakti public—­a broad, imagined bhakti community—­in early modern
North India that was united by similar aesthetic tastes, a common moral sense,
and shared norms of emotional value and expression.57
Through the movement of manuscripts, itinerant ascetics, traveling singers
and scholars, bhakti’s metrical verses spread across North India, sung and heard
in public settings in which they conveyed and shaped a distinctive bhakti sensi-
bility while fostering a consciousness of belonging to a translocal imagined
bhakti community.58 If the bhakti public of Sultanate and Mughal India was an
“imagined community” of sorts, then, like any imagined community, as Birgit
Meyer has explained, “to become experienced as real,” it had to “materialize in
the concrete lived environment and be felt in the bones” of its members. 59
Through their active participation—­singing and listening—­in the discourse of
bhakti, members of the imagined community that was the bhakti public were able
to experience its reality viscerally, in shared experiences and emotional senti-
ments. As Sara Ahmed has highlighted, sentiments are not private psychologi-
cal states “residing” in people and things; rather, “emotions do things,” they
circulate between people and work to bind individual subjects into a collec-
tive.60 As I demonstrate, the cultivation, celebration, and circulation of partic-
ular emotions was central to the bhakti public of early modern North India. In
this respect, we might characterize the bhakti public as, in some sense, a broad
“emotional community,” a term coined by Barbara Rosenwein to suggest the
existence of a type of social formation “in which people adhere to the same
norms of emotional expression and value—­or devalue—­the same or related
emotions.” 61 Rosenwein explains, “Emotional communities are groups,” which
can be narrowly delineated (e.g., the Rāmānandī sampradāy at Galta) or more
broadly conceived (e.g., the early modern North Indian bhakti public), “that
have their own particular values, modes of feeling, and ways to express those

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 18 9 Introduction

feelings.” 62 Similarly, Bruce Lincoln has argued that social entities are “con-
structed from nothing so much as from sentiments.” These sentiments, he
says, “constitute the bonds and borders that we reify” as social groups, and it is
discourse—­in our case, bhakti songs and stories—­that “evokes the sentiments
out of which [such social formations are] actively constructed.” 63 We might say
that the bhakti discourse circulating through early modern North India was
able to forge community so successfully because it appealed more to the heart
than to the head.
The social work of bhakti was accomplished in the cultivation of feeling—­the
transmission of affect—­far more than in the conveying of theology and ideol-
ogy. The bhakti public expanded and generated conviction among its members
not through rational persuasion so much as through affective congruence, not
by “winning minds” but by investing participants in deeper structures of reli-
gious feeling.64 As Ann Pellegrini has written, “the capacity of any particular
religious rhetoric to speak to someone, to reach in and grab hold, is not about
cognitive matching, but affective resonances.” 65 Or, in Donovan Schaefer’s words,
religion “feels before it thinks, believes, or speaks.” 66 While theological lessons
and doctrinal teachings certainly matter in important ways, it is especially
through affect—­feelings and sentiments that exceed our conscious, cognitive
capacities—­that religion ultimately moves people and binds them in collectivi-
ties.67 Throughout this book, I conceive bhakti as a sensibility in order to high-
light this embodied, affective dimension of religious life and community
formation. In doing this, I foreground the emotional, aesthetic, and moral
dimensions of bhakti religiosity and understand them as inextricably interre-
lated aspects of an embodied disposition rather than as merely cognitive or dis-
cursive phenomena.68 To think of bhakti simultaneously as both sensibility and
public is to focus attention on the ways in which bhakti religiosity, as a social phe-
nomenon, grew via the deployment of a repertoire of technologies for the
evocation and transmission of particular affects, and thus the shaping of a
particular embodied emotional, ethical, and aesthetic temperament.
Bhakti poems and stories were able to effectively mediate values and evoke
sentiments, thereby successfully enabling community formation, and a large
part of their efficaciousness in this regard comes from the fact that they were
sung. Bhakti communicated in and through song (kīrtan, bhajan)—­t ypically in
social settings (with active audience participation) and accompanied by music—­
and this gave it great affective power. As Linda Hess has stated, “A song is much
more than its lyrics. A song is sound. A song is a mood, an environment of
emotion—­bhāv in Hindi.” 69 The meaning and emotional experience of a poem
or story change drastically when music is wedded to the words and when the
words are not read but heard—­felt in the body—­a s song. As Tyler Williams
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 Introduction = 19

explains, the aesthetic effect of a performed bhakti song or story “could only take
place through sound, and in time. Meter, alliteration, rhythm, rhyme and the
various ‘special effects’ crafted by virtuoso poets . . . ​only worked when the
poems were recited and experienced out loud.”70 The experience of song is an
aesthetic event in which the values and sentiments expressed discursively in
poetry are dislodged from the constraints of language such that they can be
received by the senses in a more visceral fashion. For those participating in the
performance—­the singing—­of the poet’s work, bhakti is imbibed, tasted, and
digested as a fact of the body, not simply the mind.71 Repeated participation in
these social contexts—­with their common aesthetic forms (types and styles of
storytelling, singing, musical performance, etc.), repertoire of consistent bhakti
themes and messages, and references to shared narrative heroes (gods and
saints)—­would no doubt have induced certain “modes, and moods, of feeling
together” and generated an “effervescent sentiment of sharing and taking part
in a larger social ensemble.”72 Here we glimpse bhakti’s pedagogy of affect,
wherein participants—­by singing and hearing bhakti songs and stories—­a re
taught (at a prediscursive level) what bhakti feels like, and what it feels like to
be bhakta-­jana, one of “the people of bhakti.”73 Whether singing along or simply
listening, those who attended the performance of these bhakti compositions
would have been shaped by their participation, their senses and sensibilities
tuned in particular ways, with shared emotions mobilized among them.
The songs and stories of bhakti not only evoked shared emotion and bound
their participants into a collective but also imagined a social world and pro-
moted particular ethical values and virtues. As Warner explains, “All discourse
or performance addressed to a public must characterize the world in which it
attempts to circulate, projecting for that world a concrete and livable shape, and
attempting to realize that world through address.”74 Along these lines, as I see it,
the circulating songs and stories of bhakti elaborated a particular culture and
its embodied way of life, encouraging the further circulation of—­a nd, more
importantly, the realization of—­their outlook and sensibility. Drawing on the the-
oretical work of Charles Hirschkind (elaborated in his research on Islam, piety,
and popular media in modern Egypt), we can say that the bhakti public promoted
the cultivation of certain emotions, modes of expression, and aesthetic tastes,
as well as certain ethical values, and thereby shaped the form of collective life
and culture that its members would endorse and contribute to.75 Through
repeated participation in bhakti song, story, and ritual, a certain pious disposi-
tion—­an emotional and aesthetic sensibility underlying ethical conduct—­would
become sedimented in the character of the bhakta.76 In the historical context of
early modern North India, then, it seems that the circulation of the aural media
of bhakti songs produced a “soundscape” that animated and sustained the
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 20 9 Introduction

perceptual habits and embodied (emotional-­aesthetic-­ethical) sensibilities

undergirding the larger bhakti public.77
I touch on these theoretical points throughout the book, but to briefly sum-
marize, in the forthcoming pages I approach the early modern social world of
bhakti in North India in terms of the growth of a bhakti public defined by the
circulation of devotional compositions whose performance communicated and
rendered bhakti ideas and values as a sensibility—­as facts of the body, not just
the mind.78 Bhakti songs and stories evoked shared emotions and thereby gen-
erated an experience of participation in the larger bhakti public, an imagined
community defined by the circulation of its discourse, yes, but also—­a nd just
as importantly—­an emotional and aesthetic community materializing in concrete,
lived environments and felt in the bones of its members. Importantly, the kind
of emotional, aesthetic, and ethical sensibility that characterized Sultanate and
Mughal India’s bhakti public was one that was Sufi inflected and one that, in sig-
nificant part, was formed in contradistinction to the sensibilities of yogīs and
Śāktas.

Methodological Frames: On History,

Categories, and Comparison

From one angle, this book’s central intention is to offer a fine-­grained investi-
gation of the content of early modern bhakti primary sources in order to under-
stand the historical context, causes, and dynamics of the rise of bhakti idioms
and communities in Mughal India. The most fundamental conclusions of this
monograph emerged through the close reading and interpretation of bhakti
primary sources in old dialects of Hindi (especially Brajbhasha, Avadhi, and
“Sant-­bhasha”), many in unpublished manuscripts acquired over the course
of multiple years of archival research in North India. Nevertheless, as these
introductory pages should have made clear, this book attempts more than just
a focused, philologically incisive analysis of early modern bhakti poetry and
hagiography in North India. It is also a sweeping genealogical study of the his-
torical origins of popular Indian conceptions of bhakti and tantra and a tracing
out of bhakti’s changing, but always constitutive, historical relationships with
yoga, tantra, and asceticism. In this respect, I have ventured far from the early
modern period in order to construct a wide-­ranging historical narrative of
South Asian religiosity with Bhakti as its central protagonist, Tantra as some-
thing of a costar, and Yoga and Sufism each also playing key supporting roles.

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The historical sweep of the narrative I present is somewhat ambitious. Though

I focus my attention primarily on the period from roughly 1450 to 1700, and on
Hindi-­Brajbhasha sources of North India, I make an argument about major reli-
gious and epistemic changes stretching from medieval India (ca. 600–­1200) to
the present day. It would have been easier to restrict the scope of this project
to a narrower field, but I have deliberately sought to offer a broad-­strokes argu-
ment out of the conviction that such work is necessary—­i ndeed, absolutely
crucial—­to advancing the scholarly conversation. On occasion, all the up-­close
research on “the trees” conducted in our various subfields—­themselves subtly
divided along lines of specialization in particular languages, periods, regions,
methodological approaches, and research topics—­needs to be competently
woven together in order to provide a new and improved picture of “the forest,”
an updated, overarching historical frame within which more narrowly focused
scholarship can be situated. Kathryn Lofton has noted “a diminishment of stud-
ies attempting to explain broad themes in religious history out of a fear that to
do so may violate the granular greatness of any subject’s contradictory expres-
sion.” As she puts it, “We have become so worried that we will contribute to the
bigotry of caricature that we have become lost in pointillist profusions. . . . ​We
have become Borges’s cartographers, who, in their effort to map accurately
the crevice of every mountain, created a map the size of the territory.”79 With
this in mind, several of the major arguments of this book—­e.g., those about the
relationships between bhakti, tantra, and Sufism—­a re meant to speak to broad
themes in India’s religious history. While it is possible that fine-­g rained case
studies of particular devotional, tantric, or Sufi authors or region-­specific com-
munities might complicate the broad picture this book paints, I am confident
that any such work cannot deny the overarching trends and relationships iden-
tified here.
As historians know well, history is not “revealed” or “discovered” so much
as it is constructed in the narratives we compose about it. From a huge, seam-
less, and only partially accessible historical reality, we fabricate manageable
intellectual parts and perceptual frames, categories with which to talk about
and make sense of the past. There are elements of genuine creativity and imag-
ination involved in our crafting of history, particularly in the crucial act of
bringing “coherence to the historical archive by identifying an organizing prin-
ciple or theme.” As Christian Wedemeyer explains, this is an act that “involves
using rhetoric to juxtapose two or more things, with the aim of illuminating
the subject matter through comparison.”80 This book takes up, juxtaposes, and
compares Bhakti, Tantra, Yoga, and Sufism in a variety of ways in order to pres-
ent a historical narrative that self-­consciously slices up and shapes an infinitely

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 22 9 Introduction

complex, obscure, and polyvalent historical reality into a story—­incomplete yet

faithful to the historical record.81 The hope is that it brings new coherence to
our understanding of a broad swath of Indian religious history.
Bhakti, “tantra,” and “yoga” are indigenous terms with multiple, historically
changing and contested meanings, but they are also scholarly categories. Con-
ceptual categories like Bhakti, Tantra, and Yoga allow us to wrap our heads
around and make sense of the objects of our scholarly inquiry; they allow us to
impose meaningful distinctions upon what is in actuality “a world of continu-
ous shades of difference and similarity.”82 The categories we use should always
be subject to interrogation and revision, changing as our understanding changes,
but in fact, it is often our categories that mold our understanding rather than
the other way around. We know, on some level, that “map is not territory,” but
still the map very often comes to dictate the terms in which we understand the
territory. In this sense, the conceptual categories that are our most important
tools in the scholarly enterprise of understanding and explaining are also our
most dangerous obstacles.
For anyone trying to understand South Asian history and religion, there is
no question that Bhakti, Tantra, and Yoga are “historiographically over-­
burdened” conceptual terms that can obscure more than they reveal.83 One of
this book’s goals is to challenge dominant scholarly understandings of Bhakti,
Tantra, and Yoga and to show how the currently accepted parameters of these
academic categories (a) marginalize important dimensions of what bhakti, tan-
tra, and yoga have been historically in South Asia and (b) neglect the impor-
tant and changing historical interrelationships between these broad forms of
Indic religiosity. Thus, in the forthcoming pages I assess, problematize, and
nuance scholarly conceptions of Tantra, Bhakti, and Yoga, historicizing and
reconceiving the tāntrika, the bhakta, and the yogī. In reality, these religious
forms and figures are not entirely discrete, existing on a spectrum in which they
may be far apart or may merge into one another completely. Upon this world of
continuous shades here I postulate—­and then methodically manipulate—­a clear
difference between them. In the words of Jonathan Z. Smith, I am “playing across
the ‘gap’ in the service of some useful end.”84 In the end, as Peter Gottschalk has
astutely observed, “the comparative methods we choose and the categorical
reflexes that we discipline in ourselves determine what interpretations appear
possible.”85 This book confirms that by adopting new comparisons—­by reflecting
upon, juxtaposing, and comparing familiar categories in unfamiliar ways—­
new and enlightening interpretations of South Asian history and religion
become possible.

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 Introduction = 23

Plan of the Work

This book is divided into three parts. Part 1 (chapters 1–­3) presents an overarch-
ing historical narrative of Indian religiosity from the early medieval age to the
Mughal period, with an aim to provide the necessary historical background and
context for understanding the rise of bhakti in early modern North India and
the significance of that event. In order to see the full picture, in chapter 1 I look
back to the medieval period in South Asia, when tantric religiosity was a main-
stream tradition pervasive in public culture. As I describe the distinctive fea-
tures, historical development, and sociology of tantric religiosity, I also explore
its relationship with bhakti. In particular, I show how tantric monastic orders
and their institutions became key players in an early medieval religiopolitical
economy linking lay bhaktas, tantric yogīs, and kings in exchanges of economic,
political, and spiritual capital. In the process readers will also learn how, dur-
ing this period, bhakti was regularly subordinated or assimilated to tantric
ritual or yogic values and practices.
In chapter 2, I explore the ways in which the spread of Sufism and cosmo-
politan Persianate culture during North India’s Sultanate period paved the way
for the explosive growth of bhakti in early modern North India. In particular, I
examine a series of interrelated historical developments in Sultanate India that
proved crucial to the emergence of North India’s bhakti movement: the decline
of tantra as a mainstream, institutionally based religiopolitical tradition; the
spread of Persian cosmopolitan authority and the growth of a new shared Indo-­
Persian culture; the expansion of popular Sufism; and, relatedly, the emergence
of a transreligious North Indian culture of charismatic asceticism and vernacu-
lar literary composition and performance. In the concluding sections of the
chapter, I describe the new transregional, transsectarian bhakti public that
was emerging in the later Sultanate period, the performative world in which
its bhakti discourse circulated, and the distinctive ethical, aesthetic, and emo-
tional sensibility cultivated within it. As will be seen, this bhakti sensibility res-
onated in remarkable ways with that of Sufism.
In chapter 3, I sketch out the historical context of Mughal India in which
bhakti institutions and literature came to flourish. I focus especially on Akbar
and the dynastic ideology, multicultural projects, religious policies, political alli-
ances, and administrative structures developed during his rule, examining
how the sociopolitical environment of Akbar’s empire facilitated the success-
ful growth of Vaiṣṇava bhakti traditions. As I illustrate, under Mughal rule North
India witnessed a broad shift in which rulers increasingly allied themselves with
Vaiṣṇava bhakti communities and their institutional forms and symbols while

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 24 9 Introduction

moving away from those of tantric Śaivism and Śāktism. Through an exami-
nation of the Kacchvāhā rulers of Amer in Rajasthan and the ways they pro-
vided other Rajput courts with a bhakti-­centered model for political success,
I show how new forms of courtliness and statehood initiated under the Mughal
emperor Akbar were linked to the emergence of bhakti communities and
bhakti literature.
In part 2 of the book (chapters 4–­6), I move from broader historical consid-
erations to a more focused study of the Rāmānandī bhakti community of early
modern North India based on close analysis of manuscripts and other (never-­
before-­t ranslated) primary source documents. In chapter 4, the discussion
focuses on the early Rāmānandī devotional community at Galta in the sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries. Examining the remembered lives of Kṛṣṇadās
Payahārī—­the founder of the community at Galta—­a nd his two primary disci-
ples, Kīlhadev and Agradās, provides insight into several key dimensions of
bhakti and the bhakti movement in early modern North India. In analyzing the
Galta Rāmānandīs, I demonstrate that the religiosity of the bhakta often had
more elements of asceticism, tantra, and yoga than has ordinarily been sup-
posed, while at the same time showing how a new understanding of bhakti was
emerging in early modern North India and these once rather tightly interwo-
ven threads of religious practice were beginning to unravel into increasingly
distinct strands of religious sensibility. As will become clear, the case of the early
Rāmānandī bhaktas suggests the need for revisions to widespread conceptions
of the scholarly category of Bhakti.
In chapter 5, I compare and contrast the yogic-­a scetic stream of the
Rāmānandīs with the tantric Nāth yogīs in order to explore the ways in which
the distinctive bhakti religious sensibility that was emerging in early modern
North India was coming into tension and conflict with certain aspects of the
tantric tradition. How were tantric Nāth ascetics and yoga-­practicing Rāmānandī
bhaktas similar and how were they different? To answer this question, I delve
into the history of yoga, questioning and refining the category of “the yogī”
itself. In contrast to many scholarly claims, the yogic practice of the Nāths was
considerably different from that of the Rāmānandīs and was an expression of
their tantric Kaula and siddha heritage. As reflected in the Rāmānandīs’ and
Nāths’ respective attitudes toward supernormal powers (siddhis) in yogic prac-
tice, the early modern period in North India witnessed a widening gap between
devotional and tantric conceptions of and approaches to the Divine. Indeed, at
this time we see the emergence of a new bhakti sensibility constructed against
the foil of attitudes and practices associated with the tantric yogī.
In chapter 6, I examine the formation of early modern bhakti sensibilities and
communities through a case study of the life and compositions of a particular
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 Introduction = 25

Rāmānandī figure, Agradās, the great—­but little studied—­sixteenth-­century

poet-­devotee and founder of the Rām-­rasik tradition. Using never-­before-­
discussed manuscripts collected in the archives of North India, I demonstrate
that the writings of Agradās teach us much about how bhakti communities in
Mughal India went about defining their identities and competing with others
for patronage, prestige, and power. Agradās inaugurated a vernacular literary
project within the Rāmānandī community whose goals were to praise the deeds
of great devotee saints and spread the saving message of bhakti in a manner that
would simultaneously attract the respect of brahmanical orthodoxy, the rec-
ognition and financial support of elites, and the allegiance of devotee followers
of even the lowest social classes. An entrepreneur in Mughal India’s religious
marketplace, his literary project strategically bolstered the position of the
Rāmānandīs while simultaneously expanding the circulation of a transsectar-
ian, transregional bhakti aesthetic, emotional, and ethical sensibility.
In part 3 (chapters 7–­8), I pan out from the Rāmānandīs in order to conduct
a broader investigation of early modern North Indian devotional poetry and
hagiography. These two chapters demonstrate most clearly how developing
bhakti sensibilities contrasted with and opposed tantric, yogic, and ascetic reli-
gious approaches, and the ways in which these bhakti sensibilities were Sufi
inflected. In chapter 7, I survey and analyze references to Nāths, Śāktas, yogīs,
yoga, tantra, and mantra scattered throughout the poetry of major bhakti
saints. Discussing poet-­saints who cover the spectrum in terms of sectarian
affiliation, theological outlook, caste background, and geographical location, I
show how a diverse array of bhaktas typically came together as one in position-
ing themselves against the “twofold tantric other” of the yogī and Śākta. In
looking at the ways in which bhaktas contrasted themselves with tantric yogīs
and Śāktas, we will achieve a better grasp of exactly what bhakti meant to dev-
otees in early modern North India and how it was perceived as different from
other modes of religiosity.
In chapter 8, I explore the Sufi inflection of the early modern North Indian
bhakti by engaging in a comparative analysis of Sufi and bhakti literatures. I begin
by examining the presence of the tantric yogī in the Sufi premākhyāns and in the
poetry attributed to Mīrābāī and Sūrdās, wherein yoga is subsumed by devo-
tion and the yogī subtly co-­opted into the service of a message about the power
of passionate love for God. I then turn to a consideration of miracle stories—­
especially involving spiritual competitions with yogīs—­in Sufi and bhakti hagi-
ographies, where we see the articulation of a shared conception of God and
appropriate religious behavior, one formed in clear contradistinction to tant-
ric and yogic-­ascetic religious modes. In this penultimate chapter, I suggest
important potential avenues of Sufi influence on North India’s bhakti movement
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 26 9 Introduction

while adding further evidence for how the formation of devotional sensibilities
in early modern North India relied in part on the stigmatization of tantric and
yogic religious approaches.
In the final chapter, I suggest that widespread modern Indian conceptions
of Bhakti and Tantra are not simply the products of British colonial influence
and imported Protestant-­biased Orientalist understandings; rather, they
have important continuities with the attitudes and values expressed in the
compositions of early modern bhakti authors, themselves influenced impor-
tantly by Persianate literary and political culture and a Sufi-­i nflected reli-
gious environment.

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