Celebrating Jack Hawley's fine scholarship on Bhakti traditions

Raziuddin Aquil 

Some of the finest historians are continuously raising standards of scholarly enterprise through their exacting research and awe-inspiring publication, often updating and refashioning their older classics and deploying new sets of research material to further strengthen their arguments or for revising older propositions for that matter. Professor John Stratton Hawley, informally known as Jack, is one of the foremost scholars of the leading Sants of the north Indian Bhakti traditions (circa 1450-1650), especially of Krishna-bhakt par excellence, sixteenth-century poet and singer, Surdas. 

Professor Hawley has recently published a revised version of his book, Surdas: Poet, Singer, Saint (Primus Books). It includes a whole new 100 page chapter based on visual material from the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth-century Udaipur, which illustrates how the later image of Surdas as a blind poet was shaped; whereas the Sant's compositions in early versions of his famous Sursagar had an extraordinary range - seemingly transcending the usual saguna/nirguna divide in Bhakti traditions, and not necessarily a blind by birth poet, but as someone who had seen it all. 

As Professor Hawley writes, "sagunis worship God through his appearance and attributes, through his manifest form, as in the insistence on experiencing Krishna in his full earthly form", or in the worship of Sri Ram of Ayodhya by the doyen among Ram-bhakts Tulsidas, author of the celebrated text Ramcharit-manas. By contrast, "the nirguni position holds that God can truly be worshipped only in the absence of attribute and form". This approach of Bhakti saints mainly coming from low-caste backgrounds also attacks injustices and hierarchy in society, criticises idol-worship - especially discriminatory control over rituals - and, therefore, recommends searching for a formless God, which might be found inside one's heart also.

Some of the saint-poets attempted a reconciliation between the two positions. According to Hawley, Surdas' writings show clear attempts at crossing boundaries. Chant the name of Ram if you must, ram naam mukh let, or remember Krishna, hari hari hari hari sumiran karau, Surdas would call himself a sinner, hoping for salvation:

Patitani main vikhyaat patit haun, paavan naam tumhaarau

I am a notorious sinner among the sinners 

You are known as the saviour 

As one of the most respected scholars of the vast corpus of Medieval Bhakti literature, especially the voluminous compositions of Sursagar, Professor Hawley has also published, as part of the very impressive Murty Classical Library of India series, the English translation of a new edition of Sursagar (prepared by Professor Kenneth Bryant), comprising verses found in earliest of the manuscripts and attributed to Surdas. The impressive series of publication of India's literary classics (original texts with simultaneous English translations) edited by a team led by eminent Sanskrit scholar Sheldon Pollock is a fine initiative, supported by a generous gift from Rohan Narayana Murty of Infosys.

For further dissemination of state of the art scholarship in various strands of Bhakti traditions, Professor Hawley's book on "three Bhakti voices" - Mirabai, Surdas and Kabir - has just been published in a Hindi translation by Rajkamal Prakashan. Professor Hawley has also recently brought out another award-winning book on the politics and historiography of Bhakti, bringing the narrative down to our difficult times, A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement (Harvard University Press). Together, the Sants, along with Sufis like the Chishtis, are central to the making of India's national culture of unity in diversity - enabling peaceful coexistence amidst amazing plurality of religious traditions and practices.

For this writer, the Sufi-Bhakti complex of medieval and early modern India remains a crucial marker of India's devotional tradition and cultural diversity, with all the competitions, appropriations and distinctiveness as separate and overlapping strands of popular religiosity, with which the political domain must maintain respectful equidistance. Yet, if God is one and is the creator of everything, how are the wily politicians able to make people fight with and kill each other, often in the name of religion itself? An outstanding feature of religious movements has been aimed at uniting the people, but as religious communities take the forms of sparring sampradays, panths and firqas, they necessarily exclude and otherise people. Political vultures feed and thrive on these difficulties.

Thus, Bhakti could be understood as an expression of love, devotion and sharing; it could also be comprehended as emotional songs of powerful social protest; and it can be a violent language of politics as well. In times we live and always, we need Bhakti as a unifying movement, as a matter of heart and above divisive politics of various kinds. Scholars have been showing the way; can politicians behave responsibly? One cannot understand the peaceful resolution of, and consensus on religious questions in Indian history and culture if one has not properly understood the complex intricacies of devotional traditions and community relations.

Irrespective of the political considerations of the time, a number of other scholars have also contributed immensely to multidimensional Bhakti historiography in recent decades. Besides Professor Hawley's excellent work, one may look out for the formidable scholarship of Charlotte Vaudeville, David Lorenzen, Linda Hess, Philip Lutgendorf, Purushottam Agarwal, and more recently Christian Lee Novetzke. Together, all of them have aimed at understanding the emotional expression of love for the divine in broader Hindu traditions, which in some contexts gets transformed into a violent language of politics, unfortunately.

To slightly paraphrase Professor Hawley in a recent essay, in the volume he has recently edited with Christian Lee Novetzke and Swapna Sharma, Bhakti and Power: Debating India's Religion of the Heart (Orient Blackswan): "The garland of Bhakti mediates across boundary-markers – intellectual and emotional, classical and vernacular, regional and national, powerful and weak. It stands in the middle of much of the life of religion in India and elsewhere. It may not cover the waterfront, but truly it does bridge”.