1264 Reviews of Books
bhakti, Hawley takes us on a long, leisurely crisscrossing
tour of the variegated and intersecting pathways that re-
sulted in the crystallization of the idea of the bhakti
movement in the 1920s and 1930s. Reminiscent of a
“khadı̄ (homespun) garment partly woven of imported
thread” (58), the bhakti movement wove together British
orientalist and Indian nationalist sentiments. Although
the term is of recent origin, the antiquity of the “bhakti
movement” has become “historiographical common
sense” (6). Standard accounts portray a “movement” that
began in the south in the sixth or seventh century C.E.,
spread to the north, and eventually swept the entire sub-
continent by the seventeenth century, imbuing the medie-
val with particular salience. Hawley meticulously dissects
this idea to untie the threads and offer a tapestry of rough
tracks, serrated surfaces, and jagged ends that constitute
a “crazy quilt” (310). Six exhaustive chapters take us from
Rabindranath Tagore and Shantiniketan, the university
town established by him that housed Hazariprasad Dvi-
vedi, the principal craftsman of “bhakti a ndolan” (11),
through the Bh agavata Purana that constructed the edi-
fice of the concept of bhakti_ (10), to the evolution and
consolidation of the idea of four samprad ays—traditions
of teaching and writing—that uphold the edifice of bhakti
by being the principal channels of communication in the
assumed transit of bhakti from the south to the north
(10), and return to Bengal (Navadwip) and Shantiniketan
via Galta (and Naraina), Brindavan, and Jaipur to com-
ment on the mingled future of bhakti and India in the sev-
enth, final chapter.
What does this richly textured circumambulation tell
us? That the idea of the bhakti movement is contingent
and not uncontested, even in the twentieth century; that
the Mughal state and Mughal-Rajput (Kachvaha) alli-
ance (sixteenth to seventeenth centuries) was crucial in
the evolution and configuration of bhakti as an all-India
movement in the early modern period instead of the me-
dieval; and that bhakti poetry and songs, even while occa-
sionally tied to regional courts and rulers (if we follow
Sheldon Pollock), prompted a blossoming of the vernacu-
lars as literary languages at the grassroots level (8–9).
Bhakti, therefore, has the potential of being truly liberat-
ing if its genealogy is excavated and understood properly.
The arguments are worked out step by step in the
chapters. Chapter 1 covers the serious debates over per-
ception and interpretation of bhakti among scholars of
the twentieth century, including the relative importance
of key figures such as Kabir and Surdas, and argues that
the long shared history and oral intertextuality of the “liv-
ing bhakti archive” (13) are partly responsible for such
debates. The second chapter gives priority to the Bh aga-
vata M ahatmya over the classical Bh
agavata Pur ana as a
key text that proliferated and perpetrated the “born _ in
Dravida” myth of bhakti (60). Composed somewhere be-
tween Brindavan and Haridvar during the late seven-
teenth or early eighteenth century by Brahmins, the text
incorporates clues that indicate the critical presence of
the Mughal state and Hindu-Muslim collaboration at the
imperial level during Akbar’s reign (1556–1605). The
three succeeding chapters explore articulations of bhakti
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
in Rajasthan of the seventeenth century; the constitution
of Braj and its spiritual center Brindavan as the “magnet
and conduit” (149) of the later bhakti movement through
contributions of Kachvaha rulers in the construction of
temples, the political and economic advances made dur-
ing the rule of the Afghan Suris and the Mughal Emperor
Akbar (154), and the (collective) composition of impor-
tant works by Gaudiya Vaishnavas and Vallabhites (218–
223); and the critical presence of Jaisingh II of Amer in
the consolidation of Brindavan as the nerve center of
bhakti and of the four samprad ays of Vaishnava bhakti.
Together, these multiple pasts turn the idea of bhakti’s
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transit from the south to the north upside down and up-
hold Hindu-Muslim confluence and cooperation in the
creation of the commonwealth of bhakti, pasts that can
hold out against particular appropriations of bhakti by ag-
gressive Hindu nationalism and keep alive bhakti’s liber-
ating, non-conformist, and democratic potential.
An elegantly crafted, multilayered text by an erudite
scholar of great repute, A Storm of Songs: India and the
Idea of the Bhakti Movement challenges us to think about
history, nation, and nation’s history through religion that
is political and processual, constructed and conditional.
At times, however, the details and tales within tales tend
to distract the reader; one also wishes that the unfortu-
nate error of presenting Debendranath Tagore as Rabin-
dranth’s father and grandfather had not occurred in the
sixth chapter (260, 261). These minor snags notwithstand-
ing, this text remains important and alluring, eminently
worthy of being read.
ISHITA BANERJEE-DUBE
El Colegio de México
ROBERT D. CREWS. Afghan Modern: The History of a
Global Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2015. Pp. 381. $29.95.
Afghan Modern: The History of a Global Nation presents a
well-researched and interesting history on the ways that
the territories of the various states or empires that have
been labeled “Afghan” or named “Afghanistan” and the
various groups that have at one time or another been
identified as “Afghans” integrated into international rela-
tionships. In the process, however, Robert D. Crews
makes overblown claims about his work’s significance:
“My approach . . . starts from the premise that how we
conceptualize the country, in our journalism and public-
policy debates and in much of our scholarly work, re-
mains intractably mired in tropes that bear little resem-
blance to historical reality. Pervading all of these genres,
the most enduring image of Afghanistan evokes a deso-
late, inward-looking, and isolated place” (3). The only
work Crews cites to illustrate the universality of this dis-
course is a late-nineteenth-century French study of Af-
ghan folk songs. Other scholars, including myself, have
interrogated tropes such as “Islamic fundamentalists,”
“ethnic nationalists,” “freedom fighters,” Afghanistan’s
“return to the eleventh century,” “tribalism,” “feudal-
ism,” “traditionalism,” and “modernity.” No doubt I am
particularly biased on this point, as the first chapter of my
OCTOBER 2016
 Canada and the United States
principal book on Afghanistan (The Fragmentation of Af-
ghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the Interna-
tional System [2002]) concludes: “The modern or post-
modern world is not absent or weak in places like Af-
ghanistan, but it exerts itself in ugly ways we prefer to
deny . . . The violence and decay of Afghanistan is the re-
flection in the mirror of that society of the violence that
created and maintains our security. ‘If you do not like the
image in the mirror,’ says an old Persian poem, ‘do not
break the mirror, break your face’” (Rubin, 5).
Crews also ignores the work of Olivier Roy, the first
scholar to my knowledge to analyze how political Islam in
Afghanistan was a modern ideology and to describe its re-
lationship to global currents in Islamic political thought.
Instead Crews disposes of both of us in a single note criti-
cizing “foreign commentators” who emphasized “the
general ethnicization of Afghan politics” during the post-
1992 bloody conflict, instead of keeping their eyes on
Afghans’ curiosity about “race in the United States,”
“anti-colonialist nationalist sentiment,” or “religious au-
thenticity and global solidarity,” and their thinking about
“development” (231). In fact Crews’s book is based on a
view that Roy and I propounded in books written over
twenty-five to thirty years ago: Afghanistan’s war, econ-
omy, culture, politics, religion, and state are not isolated
throwbacks but the result of centuries of conflict, cooper-
ation, and other interactions between the peoples of
those territories and the rest of humanity. Once one gets
past Crews’s assertions about his work’s significance,
which might be easier for readers other than me, one can
enjoy reading it and learn a lot.
Eight chapters move chronologically from ancient em-
pires through the rise and fall of Afghan empires, the
long encounter with British and Russian colonialism, the
development of the state, the growth of education and
various currents of thought among the newly educated,
the Cold War, the fall of the monarchy and the last four
decades of revolution and violence, to the present day.
The book benefits greatly from the author’s extensive ar-
chival and literary research in multiple languages (Rus-
sian, Dari, German), which he mines to provide fascinat-
ing vignettes of the development of what he calls the
“global nation” of Afghanistan.
Crews is an engaging author; while unlikely to appear
in mass-market format in airport bookshops, the book is
an easy and pleasurable read. Some might criticize the
lack of theory, but the story Crews tells speaks very well
for itself. It nonetheless leaves some questions open: the
account focuses largely on elites. These elites tended to
be more integrated with international forces, or to be in-
tegrated with them in a different way than the rural ma-
jority was. In the past several decades, lower- and middle-
class Afghans have become deeply involved with both
poppy cultivation and the study of Western languages
and ideologies, but Crews does not discuss these interac-
tions with international culture.
The educated elites tried different means to mobilize
or gain the support of others; however, Crews does not
analyze why these measures encountered widely varying
degrees of success. He sympathetically chronicles the de-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
1265
velopment of the Marxist ideology of the People’s Demo-
cratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), even calling one of
its founders, Babrak Karmal, a “leading Marxist intellec-
tual” (move over, Louis Althusser), and then recounts
PDPA co-founder Nur Muhammad Taraki’s ludicrous
discussions with Soviet premier Aleksei Kosygin without
explaining what led to the PDPA’s failure—which pre-
dated the massive CIA operation in Afghanistan.
Also, perhaps inevitably, as the narrative starts to in-
clude people I know and events in which I participated,
I found more and more errors. Crews does a nice job
skewering counter-insurgency’s faulty assumptions,
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though he does not describe how counter-insurgency cre-
ates an illusion of success through a sort of financial-mili-
tary Ponzi scheme. His account of the early fiascoes of
the Helmand Valley Project in the 1950s seem to be taken
right out of a report by today’s Special Inspector General
for Afghan Reconstruction. The book could use an
updating of that story to include an account of how the
Kajaki dam is still not finished.
The latter part of the book also includes a unique study
of the rise of Shiii political influence and intellectual cur-
rents within a global context since 2001. However, a simi-
larly extensive analysis of Sunni currents is absent. Crews
mentions the well-known points about Pakistani and
Saudi movements and organizations but barely discusses
the developments in Deobandi theory and practice that
influenced the Taliban.
Despite these inconsistencies, anyone who believes the
tropes and extravagant publicity about Afghanistan
would benefit from reading this book but probably will
not purchase it. For the rest of us, it is still an interesting
and enlightening account.
BARNETT R. RUBIN
New York University
CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES
MARK A. NOLL. In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible
in American Public Life, 1492–1783. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2016. Pp. xii, 431. $29.95.
According to Mark A. Noll, one of the preeminent histo-
rians of religion in America, “the Bible has been—and by
far—the single most widely read text, distributed object,
and referenced book in all of American history” (1). In
the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public
Life, 1492–1783 is the first installment of his planned mul-
tivolume history of the Bible in American public life.
Virtually all Christians venerate the Bible, but Protes-
tants, with their doctrine of sola scriptura, emphasized its
importance in an unprecedented manner. America’s
Puritans, in particular, embraced the concept of “bibli-
cism,” which led them “to follow ‘the Bible alone’—ab-
sent or strongly subordinating other authorities—as the
path of life with and for God” (8).
Even as Puritans attempted to remake Christendom
according to biblical principles, some Protestants, espe-
cially Quakers and Baptists, used the Bible to challenge
the very idea of Christendom. Notably, they made power-
OCTOBER 2016