Book Reviews 631

narratives, they often come in episodic fashion with little but chronology or
dramatis personae to structure the discussion. Jaffe makes few attempts to tie the

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various narratives into an overarching argument or connect them to wider de-
velopments in modern Japanese Buddhist history. For instance, as Jaffe himself
notes, the search for Buddhist unity in the authentic transmission of the Buddha’s
teachings and precepts is a recurrent theme in Japanese Buddhism, and one often
oriented towards the India of the Buddhist imagination. Jaffe literally opens
Seeking Śākyamuni with Kitabatake stumbling onto the site of the Indian ascetic’s
enlightenment and ends it with the invocation of the figure of the Buddha as
uniting all Asian Buddhists within the Great East Asian Co-Prosperity sphere.
In between, figures as diverse as Shaku Sōen, Shaku Kōzen, Kawaguchi Ekai, the
builders of a hybrid temple in Kōbe, or the pandit-trained scholars staffing sect-
arian universities all struggled with the problem of how, and on what grounds,
the unity of Buddhism can be established, a problem that itself only arose from
the encounter of different Buddhist traditions with each other as members of
the world religion “Buddhism.” At the same time, establishing a non- or trans-
sectarian Buddhism had been a pressing political problem in response to the anti-
Buddhist policies of the early Meiji period, and later, Western-trained scholars
such as Ui Hakuju or Takakusu Junjirō created a hybrid discourse drawing
equally on Western scholarship and Eastern scholasticism to ground the unity of
the Buddha’s message, just as did their colleagues among Indian pandits. In short,
there is a plethora of connections to be made among and beyond the episodic
narratives Jaffe presents, and had he attempted to do so, an already important
work would be even more impressive.
doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfz092 Stephan Licha
University of Heidelberg

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

By Patton E. Burchett. Columbia University Press, 2019. 456 pages. $70.00
(hardcover), $69.00 (e-book).
Based on archival collections, hagiographies, manuscripts, first-time transla-
tions of rare texts, fables, paintings, and songs, A Genealogy of Devotion unravels
nuanced complexities of religiosity in early modern North India. It problem-
atizes different kinds of stereotypes seen in academia, such as unequivocal
and unhistoricized understandings of bhakti as a continuous temporal emotive
flow, the idea that puritanical notions of bhakti were shaped during the colonial
period, and more specialized understandings about yogic similarities between
Nath Yogis and Ramanandi devotees. The book’s main argument is that two chief
tendencies characterized medieval and early modern North Indian religiosity:
(1) up to the sixteenth century, bhakti, tantra, and yoga were enmeshed as part of
632 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

an embodied habitus of faith, and (2) since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
a Sufi-inflected bhakti discourse emerged as a more distinct phenomenon with

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a bounded character that posited tantric yogis and mother goddess-worshipping
cults (Saktas) as clear and inferior others.
Patton E. Burchett’s book, with its main strengths in the wide textual corpus, an
overarching longue-durée temporal sensitivity (1450–1750, and also extending to
the medieval period, 600–1200), and broad geographical base, contributes a strong
argument. Developing on congealed present-day attitudes towards bhakti as a pure
form of emotive subservience towards a personal god and tantra as left-handed,
esoteric, often even licentious religious propensities, Burchett argues that ra-
ther than conceptualizing these popular understandings of reformed Hinduism
as having been constructed during the colonial period through Protestantism-
inspired notions of religion as monotheistic and puritanical, scholarship should
be sensitive to clear historical indications that divisions between modes of faith
like bhakti and tantra were formulated during the premodern times. Late nine-
teenth- and early twentieth-century Western scholarship and Indian reformist dis-
courses intensified these already-present divisions. The presence of the Turks and
Afghans in North India—with popular Sufism, Persianate literature, politics, and
aesthetics, the complex interactions of Sanskritic systems and the Persian cosmop-
olis, new Mughal-Rajput court cultures, and patronage towards Vaishnava bhakti
in a post-tantra world—had already laid the critical ground for bhakti-tantra
divergence. However, the book skillfully shows throughout that this divergence
was also critically accompanied by complex overlaps between these sacred mo-
dalities. Burchett thus makes a critical contribution to scholarship that otherwise
has not clearly developed on these important relational networks in the North
Indian religious landscape. Thus, the book has a strong and refreshing thesis about
continuities in religious temperaments during and through the colonial period.
It ambitiously and successfully provides a “new coherence” to ideas of Indian re-
ligious history (22). However, although both the intersections and differences of
Sufi-inflected bhakti, tantra, and yoga are demonstrated through the book, the
point about difference is eventually highlighted. I feel this eventual preference is
influenced by modern historiography. The author does claim that devotional com-
munities sustain through bodies and their sensoria. So, in addition to the textualist
focus, a greater sensitivity to the faith habitus of people in North India, even in
the contemporary period, may suggest powerful overlaps that are more persistent
among bhakti, tantra, and yoga.
Chapter one shows how bhakti was assimilated with and subordinated to
mainstream tantra between the ninth to twelfth centuries. Tantra was then both
mainstream and folk and had direct relations with public lives and kingly legitim-
ation. However, Burchett cites Alexis Sanderson to argue that Buddhism, Saivism,
and Vaishnavism were then “dialects of a single ‘tantric’ language” (59). From the
thirteenth century, however, tantra declined, and bhakti gathered discursive dis-
tinctness by the fifteenth century.
 Book Reviews 633

Chapter two analyzes the decline of tantra and direct Sufi influence through
mass-based devotion, poetic sensibilities, and practices of divine remembrance in

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the development of bhakti. The Nath Yogis thrived during the fourteenth to fif-
teenth centuries and were the main representatives of tantra during the period. In
their yogic methods, ascetic procedures, and so on, Sufis and Naths were similar,
and, indeed, the author argues powerfully that the former may have replaced the
latter due to their analogous modes. However, their differences were more prom-
inent, and Naths were criticized by bhakti saints and Sufis through their common
emphasis on divine love as pitted against Nath yogic power.
In chapter three, the focus is on Akbar’s rule and the formation of a distinct
bhakti public. The author concentrates on the Rajput Kacchvahas of Amer and
says that Prithviraj’s shift of allegiance from a tantric guru to the Ramanandi
bhakti order propelled a current of Hindu rulers seeking Mughal patronage
through bhakti loyalties. Burchett also argues, interestingly, that there was a res-
onance between Mughal imperial ideology, its “patrimonial bureaucratic” dis-
courses, and Vaishnava devotional sensibilities (112).
Chapter four demonstrates the supplanting of tantric orders in Galta
by Ramanandi bhakti faith with simultaneous overlaps between Nath and
Ramanandi philosophy and practices. To analyze these trends, Krishnadas
Payahari is taken up as a central figure. Hagiographies of his two main disciples,
Kilhadas and Agradas, are discussed to show that in the mid-sixteenth century,
there were two distinct devotional paths associated with the Ramanandi order: a
yogic, martial, popular nirgun, itinerant one, and the more subservient, sedentary,
orthodox sagun, literary, rasa (emotion) dominated one. The Ramanandi com-
munity, Burchett argues, was thus at the crossroads of Nath-Sant-Sufi-Vaishnava
traditions. However, although the sixteenth century thus witnessed a complex
devotional negotiation, by the eighteenth century, sharp divides were established
between Naths and Ramanandis.
Chapter five is especially interesting because it not only analyzes overlaps
of bhakti and yoga but simultaneously challenges the simplistic understanding
that both Ramanandis and Naths practiced yoga. Although there was a “shared
grammar” (170) of yogis in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, with increasing
popularization of yoga, Sufism, and Advaita Vedanta, by the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries, boundaries began coalescing. Ramanandis focused on ascetic
Hathayoga and a morally submissive temperament, and Naths, with liberation as
their aim, focused on becoming divine themselves, attaining miraculous powers,
and cultivating nada and laya yoga. In this, the pointed criticism of bhakti poets
was directed against Naths’ time and self-intensive yogic practices devoid of de-
votion vis-à-vis their own Sufism-inspired community sensibility.
In chapter six, the relatively understudied sixteenth-century figure of Agradas,
the founder of the Ram-rasik tradition, and his literary corpus are taken up, and
Burchett’s significant contribution lies in the translations of the bhakti poet’s im-
portant text, Dhyan Manjari. Agradas carefully negotiated multiple audiences
634 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

to forge a large transsectarian bhakti public through adoption of emergent aes-

thetics and political patronage to make the Ramanandi order a participant in the

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Mughal-Rajput landscape while charting a community with exclusive emotional
and ethical boundaries.
In chapter seven, the author shows that despite the presence of outliers, a
broad sensibility arose across castes, classes, and geographical locations among
bhakti and Sufi devotees and poets who were united in their appraisal of as-
cetic yogis as power hungry, pretentious, or, even when adept, unable to cope
with the essential delusions of life and separation from god, and of Saktas, as
morally suspect, with repugnant excessive ritual practices. The caricatured
“tantra-mantra” was thus replaced by congregational devotional singing of the
divine name.
Chapter eight continues with the earlier chapter’s argument but with an
interesting development. It demonstrates the construction of the tantric yogi as
an other, but there was a new deployment of the figure, the author argues. The
yogi is subsequently not criticized; rather, his attributes of egolessness, purifica-
tion, asceticism, detachment from worldly concerns, and so on are venerated,
but the devotional lovers (bhaktas) are then claimed to embody these principles
better than a yogi can—this time, however, with renewed attachment to the
divine. The chapter particularly analyzes Sufi premakhyans, the poetry of Surdas
and Mirabai, and miracle narratives from a broad geographical range in Sufi and
bhakti hagiographies. Commenting on this nuanced appropriation of the yogi
figure, Burchett says, “Yet in the dialogical cultural atmosphere of much of early
modern North India, humor, playful satire, and clever appropriation were literary
and performative tools often better suited to the task of subtly disparaging those
religious ‘rivals’ who may have less often been one’s enemies than one’s fellow par-
ticipants in debate, collaboration and competition” (282).
To conclude, Burchett’s argument that the secular philosophy and disen-
chanted rationality of British colonialism cannot be marked as the simple begin-
nings of anti-tantra attitudes because seeds of the same were sown in premodern
India is very welcome, strong, and persuasive. However, conceptually speaking,
as British colonialism’s unequivocal influence may be problematized, so positing
Islamic/Sufi influence in the Indian landscape as a “momentous event” (309) that
clarified divisions between bhakti and tantra may also be revisited. Although the
makings of boundaries among bhakti, tantra, and yoga have been highlighted
in the book, equally strong arguments are presented about their complex inter-
connections throughout history. Because devotional communities exist through
most embodied transmissions, the afterlives of these intersections in the Indian
religious landscape may also be worth exploring.
doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfaa010 Sukanya Sarbadhikary
Advance Access publication on March 24, 2020 Presidency University