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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/5/2019, SPi
T H E O X F O R D HI S T O R Y O F H I N D U I S M
General Editor: Gavin Flood

The Oxford History

of Hinduism
Modern Hinduism
Edited by
TORKEL BREKKE
1
3
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Contents
Notes on Contributors vii

Introduction to the Series xi
Introduction: Modernity and Hinduism 1

Torkel Brekke
P A R T 1 . E A R L Y HI N D U R E F O R M E RS
AND R EFORM M OVE MENTS
1. Early Modern Hinduism 17
Adrian Plau
2. Rammohun Roy and the Bengal Renaissance 36
Dermot Killingley
3. Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and Modern Hinduism 54
Hans Harder
4. Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī and ISKCON 72
Ferdinando Sardella
PA RT 2. EXPRESSIONS AND LOCATIONS

O F M O D E R N H I N D U IS M
5. Mūrti, Idol, Art, and Commodity: The Multiple Identities
of Hindu Images 93
Tanisha Ramachandran
6. Indian Cinema and Modern Hinduism 110
Gayatri Chatterjee
7. Hindu Pilgrimage and Modern Tourism 125
Knut Aukland
8. Hinduism and New Age: Patrimonial Oneness and
Religious Cosmopolitanism 141
Kathinka Frøystad
9. Online Hinduism 162
Heinz Scheifinger
vi Contents
10. Modern Hindu Diaspora(s) 179

Vineeta Sinha
P ART 3. POL I TIC S , ET HIC S , AND LAW

11. The History of Hindu Nationalism in India 203
Manjari Katju
12. Caste and Contemporary Hindu Society: Community, Politics,
and Work 216
Divya Vaid and Ankur Datta
13. Hindu Law in Modern Times: How Hindu Law Continues
in Modern India 244
Werner Menski
14. Modern Hindu Dharma and Environmentalism 261
Pankaj Jain
15. Hinduism in the Secular Republic of Nepal 275
David N. Gellner and Chiara Letizia
Index 305
Notes on Contributors
Knut Aukland is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education and

International Studies at OsloMet—Oslo Metropolitan University. Aukland
has published a series of articles exploring tourism and Hindu pilgrimage.
He has also co-edited ‘Religion, Pilgrimage and Tourism in India and China’
in the International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage (with Michael
Stausberg, 2018).
Torkel Brekke is professor in the study of religion at the University of Oslo.
He completed a D.Phil. in Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford and
specialized in South Asian religious history in the colonial period. His research
has its general focus on issues of religion and culture and their relation to
politics and economics with a broad range of topics, such as the ethics of war
in the Hindu tradition, fundamentalism in the world religions, Christian
politics in Scandinavia, and Islamic finance in the West. Brekke also works
for the liberal think tank Civita based in Oslo.
Gayatri Chatterjee, a freelance scholar based in Pune, has taught Film Studies
at the Symbiosis School for the Liberal Arts since 2011. She was previously at
the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune. She has taught and lectured
widely in the USA, and was a Fellow at the Birbeck University of London in
2015. Her book Awara (1992) won the Swarnakamal, the President’s gold
medal, as the Best Book on Cinema. Mother India (2002) was for the British
Film Institute’s film classics series. Her articles have appeared in national and
international volumes. She has made two documentary films titled Homes for
Gods and Mortals and Life is Water. A film based on her script Bitter Chestnut
is in the post-production stage.
Ankur Datta is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at South
Asian University. He has explored questions of forced migration, violence, and
victimhood with reference to Jammu and Kashmir. He has published his work
in journals such as Contributions to Indian Sociology and Modern Asian
Studies. He is the author of On Uncertain Ground: Displaced Kashmiri Pandits
in Jammu and Kashmir (2017).
Kathinka Frøystad is Professor of Modern South Asian Studies in the
Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of
Oslo. Specializing on religious diversity and change, Frøystad has interests that
span from everyday Hindu nationalism and religious transformations to ritual
intersections and the politics of religious offence. Her works include Blended
viii Notes on Contributors
Boundaries: Caste, Class and Shifting Faces of ‘Hinduness’ in a North Indian

City (2005).
David N. Gellner is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of
Oxford. He is the editor or co-editor of fourteen volumes, including Global
Nepalis: Religion, Culture, and Community in a New and Old Diaspora (with
S. L. Hausner, 2018) and Religion, Secularism and Ethnicity in Contemporary
Nepal (with S. L. Hausner and Chiara Letizia, 2016). His other books include
Rebuilding Buddhism: The Theravada Movement in Twentieth-Century Nepal
(with S. LeVine, 2005) and The Anthropology of Buddhism and Hinduism:
Weberian Themes, 2001). He has been conducting research on religion,
politics, ethnicity, and social change in Nepal since 1980.
Hans Harder is Professor of Modern South Asian Languages and Literatures
at the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University. He is the author of Sufism
and Saint Veneration in Contemporary Bangladesh: The Maijbhandaris of
Chittagong (2011) and Literature and National Ideology: Writing Histories of
Modern Indian Languages (2009).
Pankaj Jain is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the
Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Texas,
where he teaches courses on religions, cultures, ecologies, and films of India
and Asia. He is the author of Dharma and Ecology of Hindu Communities:
Sustenance and Sustainability (2011), which won the 2012 DANAM Book
Award and the 2011 Uberoi Book Award.
Manjari Katju is Professor at the Department of Political Science, University
of Hyderabad, India. She teaches courses on Indian and Comparative Politics.
She is the author of Vishva Hindu Parishad and Indian Politics (2003) and
Hinduising Democracy: The Vishva Hindu Parishad in Contemporary India
(2017). Her publications include ‘Mass Politics and Institutional Restraint:
Political Parties and the Election Commission of India’, Studies in Indian
Politics (2016) and ‘Election Commission and Changing Contours of Politics’,
Economic and Political Weekly (2009).
Dermot Killingley was Reader in Hindu Studies at Newcastle University and is
Senior Associate Fellow at the Oxford Centre of Hindu Studies. He has pub-
lished research on aspects of ancient Indian thought, and on modern develop-
ments, particularly Rammohun Roy, Vivekananda, and Radhakrishnan. His
books include Rammohun Roy in Hindu and Christian Tradition (1993).
Chiara Letizia is Professor of South Asian Religions at the University of
Quebec, Montreal, and Researcher and Lecturer in Cultural Anthropology at
the University of Milan, Bicocca. She is a research associate in the School of
Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford and an
Notes on Contributors ix
associate member of the Centre for Himalayan Studies of the CNRS. Her
research interests focus on the anthropology of South Asia, Buddhism, Hindu-
ism, ritual and symbolism, religion and politics, ethnic and religious activism.
Her publications include Religion, Secularism and Ethnicity in Contemporary
Nepal (co-edited with David N. Gellner and Sondra Hausner, 2016).
Werner Menski is Emeritus Professor in the School of Law at the School of
African and Asian Studies, University of London. His publications include
Hindu Law: Beyond Tradition and Modernity (2003) and Comparative Law in
a Global Context: The Legal Systems of Asia and Africa, 2nd edn (2002).
Adrian Plau is leading a Wellcome Trust-funded research project on health,
medicine, and treatment in early modern North India. He did his doctoral
work on Jain literature in Brajbhāṣā at SOAS, University of London. His
publications include a forthcoming critical edition and translation of
Rāmcand Bālak’s Sītācarit, a seventeenth-century version of the Rāmāyana :
that emphasizes Sītā’s perspective and that has never before been printed.
Tanisha Ramachandran is Associate Teaching Professor and Director of
Religion and Public Engagement at Wake Forest University. Her current
research examines the connection between race and religion through narra-
tives depicting Hindus as idolaters in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India
by examining writings by missionaries, Orientalists, East India Officials and
Phrenologists.
Ferdinando Sardella is a researcher and the Director for the Forum for South
Asia Studies for the Humanities and Social Sciences at Uppsala University. He
is a fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. In 2010 he received the
Donner Institute Prize for outstanding research in the field of Religious
Studies at the Åbo Akademi University in Finland. He is the author of
Modern Hindu Personalism: The History, Life, and Thought of Bhaktisid-
dhānta Sarasvatī (2013).
Heinz Scheifinger is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Zayed University,
UAE, and has previously been a faculty member at universities in South Korea,
Saudi Arabia, and Brunei Darussalam. Prior to this he was a Postdoctoral
Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland,
and at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. He has
also been a Visiting Scholar at the Singapore Internet Research Centre at
Nanyang Technological University and Visiting Assistant Professor at the
Asian University for Women, Bangladesh. His research has largely focused
on the relationship between Hinduism and digital media. Recent publications
include ‘The Significance of Non-Participatory Digital Religion: The Saiva
Siddhanta Church and the Development of a Global Hinduism’, in Murali
Balaji (ed.), Digital Hinduism—Dharma and Discourse in the Age of New
x Notes on Contributors
Media (2018), and ‘Studying Digital Hinduism’, in Sariya Cheruvallil-

Contractor and Suha Shakkour (eds), Digital Methodologies in the Sociology
of Religion (2016).
Vineeta Sinha is Head of Department at the Department of Sociology as well
as at the South Asian Studies Programme at the National University of
Singapore. Her research and teaching interests include the following areas:
Hindu religiosity in the diaspora; religion–state encounters; religion, com-
modification, and consumption practices; history and practice of sociology;
critique of concepts and categories in the social sciences; rethinking the
teaching of classical sociological theory. Her publications include Religion
and Commodification: Merchandising Diasporic Hinduism (2010) and
Religion–State Encounters in Hindu Domains: From the Straits Settlements to
Singapore (2011).
Divya Vaid is Assistant Professor in the Centre for the Study of Social
Systems, School of Social Sciences, at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her
research interests include the study of social stratification, social mobility
and inequalities, educational attainment, and the application of quantitative
research methods. She has published in journals such as the Annual Review of
Sociology, Contemporary South Asia and Asian Survey, and is the author of
Uneven Odds: Social Mobility in Contemporary India (2018).
The Oxford History of Hinduism

Introduction to the Series
The series offers authoritative, comprehensive coverage of the History of

Hinduism. Although the word ‘Hinduism’ is problematic, as the term’s origin
is only from the nineteenth century and Hindu is attested as a people’s self-
description only from the sixteenth century, it nevertheless denotes a range of
traditions within India whose roots reach deep into the past. The volumes in
this series provide a history of the religious traditions encompassed by the
term Hinduism from the first millennium BCE to the present day. One of the
problems about studying the history of Hinduism, especially in the earlier
period, concerns dating. It has been notoriously difficult to establish the dates
of early traditions, figures, and texts before the medieval period. We can fairly
accurately date Sanskrit texts of Buddhism when translated into Chinese, but
‘Hindu’ texts are more problematic, although there is general agreement about
the sequence of major developments within this history.
Another issue is the category ‘religion’. Some scholars have argued against
using it in the Indian context on the grounds of its local origin in the history of
the West, but arguably the term demarcates a set of ideas, practices, and hopes,
and the English word is no more problematic than ‘culture’ or even ‘society’.
But we do need to acknowledge these difficulties and that our claims as
scholars are always provisional, subject to correction, and our categories
must sometimes be used without consensual definition.
Each volume considers the relationship between Hinduism and the wider
society, for religion is always embedded within culture and sociopolitical
structures. Hinduism needs to be understood as dynamically engaging with
wider Indian society and with other religions, particularly Buddhism and
Jainism, throughout its long history. This dynamism and the interactive nature
of the religion are reflected in each of the volumes, some of which are more
focused on Sanskrit traditions, while other volumes will have more weight on
vernacular literatures such as Tamil. After the Vedic age, the volumes are
organized thematically and chronologically. Thus, we have volumes devoted
to the three major traditions focused on Shiva, the Goddess, and Vishnu, as
well as volumes on philosophy and practice, Hinduism in the modern world,
and vernacular traditions. Each volume addresses not only theological con-
cerns but also material culture, such as temples and architecture, along with the
history of practices such as making offerings to a deity (pūjā), observances or
vows (vrata), and pilgrimage (yatra), which cut across specific traditions.
Professor Gavin Flood FBA
General Editor of The Oxford History of Hinduism series
Introduction
Modernity and Hinduism
Torkel Brekke
In historical and social science research the term ‘modernity’ is defined in

various ways, but on the most general level it refers to deep processes
of transformation in the organization of economic activity associated with
industrialization as well as changes in the organization of human life accom-
panied by new world views and values. It is commonplace to see these
processes of modernity as originating in Western Europe sometime between
the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries and being exported to other continents
through processes of globalization, not least in the context of colonialism. In a
book called Hinduism and Modernity, David Smith (2003: 21–2) uses the idea
of the Juggernaut, the great Hindu temple wagon at Puri in Eastern India, a
metaphor of unstoppable societal processes crushing anybody who gets in the
way. Modernity and colonialism—with their often immense economic and
social disruptions—are Juggernauts in this sense. But Smith (2003: 202–3) also
ends his treatment of modernity and Hinduism with the suggestion that India is
more advanced than its previous colonial masters, in the sense that Indian
society has managed—at least to some extent—to come to terms with staggering
religious and ethnic diversity. As several chapters in this volume will explain, the
management of diversity in India is not simple and straightforward.
This means that in a volume like this there are good reasons to use the term
‘modern Hinduism’ to refer to cultural and religious developments that are
results of contact between India and the outside world or effects of processes of
globalization more generally. In this sense, a historical point of departure could
be the Battle of Plassey in 1757, after which the British secured their presence in
Bengal. Our starting point could also be pushed forward to the end of the
Napoleonic Wars in 1815, after which the British faced no competition in their
gradual colonization of South Asia. From this time, the foreign power and its
military and administrative apparatus would engage in bureaucratic and edu-
cational practices that would have great consequences for Hindu culture.
2 Torkel Brekke
But there is a problem with an approach where we use a clearly defined
starting point for modern Hinduism, a starting point that has to do with
India’s interaction with Britain and the rest of the Western world. It would
make us oblivious to religious developments in India that started long before
and that should be analysed first of all by looking at cultural and political
developments within the subcontinent. This is why this book has a first
chapter that maps and discusses the important transformations that took
place from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when religious
geniuses such as Caitanya (1486–1533) and Vallabhācārya (1473–1531)
founded new Vaiṣṇava bhakti movements and Kabir (1440–1518) relativized
boundaries between Islam and Hinduism in his mystical visions, while Guru
Nānak (1469–1539) founded Sikhism in the Punjab, collecting the religious
impulses from a range of unorthodox Hindu traditions as well as from Islam.
However, although it is important to trace the local developments that resulted
in what we may call early modern Hinduism as a precursor and background to
modern Hinduism, the main focus of the volume will be on developments
starting in the nineteenth century.
If the historical limits of modern Hinduism must remain somewhat vague,
so must the distinctions between what counts as modern and not. A lot of the
practices and ideas that we call ‘Hindu’ today are continuations, or natural
developments, of earlier forms of Hinduism. Vedic sacrificial ritual, for in-
stance, has a history stretching back three millennia and survives today in
parts of South India in much the same forms as in ancient times, although the
Vedic ritual system has also adapted to changing circumstances (Smith 2016).
In what sense can we say that such rituals, as performed today, represent
modern Hinduism? Are they elements of modern Hinduism simply because
they take place in a modern society? Or should we see them as cultural relics,
remnants of tradition that exist alongside the modernity that surrounds them?
The answer to this question must be that by ‘modern Hinduism’ we do not
mean all forms of Hinduism that are observable in India, or outside the
subcontinent, in the modern period. All chapters in this volume have been
specifically commissioned by the editor because their topics tell us something
important about what is different in the Hindu tradition as a result of
modernity.
Historical scholarship has investigated how colonialism changed religion
and culture in India and set in motion a chain of events where Hinduism
would become more aligned with Western systems of thought and where
voices representing Hinduism would become more concerned about the social
ills associated with, and sometimes justified by, the authority of Hindu trad-
ition. In this common conception of modern Hinduism, there is an inevitable
tension, even contradiction, between the traditional and the modern. What is
more, the modern is associated with progress and enlightenment while the
traditional is associated with backwardness and social ills. Often, modern

Hinduism is associated with the religious transformations initiated by great
reformist figures, such as Rammohun Roy or Svāmi Dayānand Sarasvatī, but it
is important to stress that modern Hinduism is not necessarily the same as
reformed Hinduism (Hatcher 2016: 8–11).
THE IN VEN TION OF HINDUISM?
One of the most contentious issues in scholarship about modern Hinduism is

the argument that Hinduism is an entity created by colonial scholarship rather
than an indigenous category. For the sake of simplicity, we may call this the
Orientalist thesis, borrowing the term ‘Orientalism’ to refer to processes in
which categories were constructed by Westerners to classify societies of the
Orient. The categories were often essentializing, out of sync with reality, and
served political purposes such as categorizing and governing subject peoples.
Many scholars have made the argument that Hinduism is such an invented
and essentializing category.
This Orientalist argument was advanced in a critical and polemical way by
Ronald Inden in a 1990 book called Imagining India, where the author accused
scholars of India of transforming Indians into irrational beings without
agency, while the Western scholar presumably has access to real and objective
knowledge about Indian history and civilization (Inden 1990). The book
generated reactions from other scholars claiming his criticism was unfair to
those who work diligently to increase knowledge about India and its cultures
while attempting to steer clear of either denigrating or romanticizing claims
and statements. In a 1990 article, Timothy Fitzgerald made the more limited
and more precise claim that it is a mistake to see Hinduism as a world religion
on a par with Christianity and that the tendency to make this false parallel
originated in theological arguments from within the Christian tradition.
Fitzgerald (1990) borrowed the distinction between world religions and
group-tied religions suggested by Ninian Smart, but insisted that it is an
insufficient approach to research and teaching if we analyse a religion as a
world religion abstracted from situated social realities. Similar arguments were
developed by Richard King (1999) in a book that said, among other things,
that Hinduism is a modern Western concept based on a Christian paradigm of
religion where scripture is seen to define the essence of a religious tradition.
However, as documented by Brian K. Pennington (2005), the invention of
Hinduism was not a one-way process where colonial administrators and
scholars created a conceptual and institutional straitjacket for the vast reli-
gious traditions of India. Indian intellectuals and leaders participated actively
in a dialogue on the nature of religion in general, and of Hinduism in
particular, a dialogue precipitated by the institutions and channels of
4 Torkel Brekke
communication created by colonialism, initially located in the colonial
heartland of Bengal and its metropolis Calcutta. Some scholars think that
there has been enough deconstruction of the concept of Hinduism and that we
need to move on from this debate. As long as we are conscious of the fact that
the modern concept of Hinduism was in fact constructed by certain historical
processes of scholarly enquiry and debate from the nineteenth century and
that the concept has its limitations, like any concept used to study cultural
phenomena across time and space, we should probably not worry too much
about the alleged dangers of using the concept Hinduism (Sweetman 2003).
Even if we agree that enough energy has been spent on debates about
whether or not Hinduism was invented, and the degree to which this invention
rested on imperial and even racist institutional practices, there is a lesson here
that needs to be taken seriously in a volume on modern Hinduism. The things
that we now call religions are not things that exist in a straightforward sense,
like animal species. On the contrary, the entities that we today call Hinduism
(and other world religions) came into being through a long process that we can
call reification. The core of this word is the Latin word res, which means ‘thing’.
Reification is the process by which we make something into a thing. Religions
were made into things by a variety of bureaucratic and scientific practices
performed by the modern state: measuring, counting, mapping, delimiting, and
defining. From the late 1800s, global processes increasingly standardized how
religions are defined and how religious institutions are organized. This stand-
ardization was closely linked to processes of globalization, such as the increased
speed of information-sharing across continents and the expansion of Western
models of political and bureaucratic organization.
MODERNITY AND STANDARDIZATION
Modernity is a powerful force for standardization in the sphere of culture,

language, and religion, particularly when it converges with the ideology and
practices of nationalism, which affected most societies in the world from the
mid to late nineteenth century. In several parts of India, particularly in
the cities, Hinduism went through processes of reification, and this laid the
foundation for Hinduism to reinvent itself as a universal and missionary
religion increasingly detached from ethnic identities (Brekke 1999). One result
is that Hindu teachers today compete with missionaries from other religions to
attract followers in Western societies. In these powerful processes of cultural
transformation, the highly diverse religious traditions that existed in India
before the modern era were increasingly standardized. Traditions that did not
fit into new social and political realities were defined as outside the real
Hinduism.

The Ārya Samāj was among the most important movements that sought to
reform Hindu religion and create cultural solidarity that would transcend
sectarian and caste boundaries, uniting Hindus across the country. The
organization was founded in 1875 by the Gujarati Brahmin Svāmi Dayānand
Sarasvatī (1824–83) and was very influential in the Punjab in the north-west of
the subcontinent. Dayānand’s book Sathyārth Prakāsh, first published in 1875,
would have a major influence on the development of modern Hinduism in
northern India, as would the many later publications from the Ārya Samāj.
The Ārya Samāj was part of a broad spectrum of religious reform efforts taking
place in the Punjab and beyond in the final decades of the nineteenth century,
not only locking horns with other reformist Hindus, but also making fierce
rhetorical attacks against Sikhism and Islam (Jones 1976: ch. 5). The religious
and social reform promoted by the Ārya Samāj was similarly opposed by other
Hindu groups, who felt that they threatened orthodox Hinduism. Throughout
northern India, dharma societies conceptualized themselves as caretakers of
Sanātana Dharma—the true, eternal Hinduism—and sought to provide a
united front against the Ārya Samāj and like-minded modern reformists
(Jones 1976: ch. 4; Zavos 2001). The self-proclaimed defenders of orthodoxy
found several issues of great symbolic value on which to focus their public
campaigns: cow protection and the traditional ritual roles of images (mūrti)
were two essential issues.
Although in direct competition for followers and cultural hegemony, the
modern reformists and the traditionalist Sanātanists often agreed on the
need for unity and solidarity in the face of foreign rule and Christian mis-
sionary activity. They disagreed, however, about the basic organizing prin-
ciples that would bring about India-wide Hindu unity. The reformists believed
that caste—and particularly the oppression of the lower castes and
untouchables—was an obstacle to unity, while the orthodox often sought to
retain the high status of the Brahmins and referred to tradition and scripture
to defend social hierarchies. When we move from the late nineteenth to the
early twentieth century, such disagreements were largely overshadowed by
new and powerful forces of Hindu nationalism that insisted on unity and
solidarity across barriers of geography, class, and caste.
In this process of nineteenth-century standardization, Vaiṣṇavism was
often elevated to the status of being the ‘real’ religion of the Hindus, at the
expense of other cultural and religious traditions. The Hinduisms that did not
make it into the new standard version of the religion were often traditions that
did not sit well with the morality of an emerging urban middle class influenced
by Christian norms prevailing in Victorian Britain. As a case in point,
Tantrism was ‘the preponderant religious paradigm’ in India historically, but
was increasingly marginalized both by middle-class Hindus and by modern
scholars in the formulation of a modern type of Hinduism (White 2006: 2–3).
We could say, then, that standardization also has an aspect of sanitation.
6 Torkel Brekke
In Benares, the important writer and orator Bhāratendu Hariśchandra
:
looked for the basic ingredients of a universal Hinduism in Vais: navism. He
called this collective universal Hindu religion Hindu dharma, and sought to
offer his countrymen a religion that would unite all Hindus of the subcontin-
ent and be the basis for national religious identity (Dalmia 1997). He worked
for the status of both Hinduism and the Hindi language in the face of
colonialism and the challenge from Christian missionaries in India. Svāmi
Vivekānanda was a slightly later proponent of a standardized form of Hindu-
ism. He saw the Advaita Vedānta tradition as the core of Hinduism, and he
was a key figure in the process of elevating Vedānta to Hinduism par excel-
lence. Vivekānanda was part of a globalized academic debate with Western
and other Asian scholars about the history and theology of Indian religions
(King 1999: ch. 6, pp. 118–19; Brekke 2002).
An honest critique of the categories we use in the study of religion would
need to discuss how the academic study of religion itself was important in the
processes of standardization and formatting of religions, including Hinduism.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, European scholars started con-
ceptualizing the world as consisting of a certain number of great and relatively
cohesive cultural units that could be called world religions (Masuzawa 2005).
They were of the opinion that the world religions were shaped by their
foundational texts, and their advanced traditions of textual interpretation,
which are typically the domains of learned priesthoods. Except for a few
scattered tribal societies that still held on to what was perceived as illiterate
magical world views, humanity as a whole could now quite neatly be divided
into these world religions. In other words, this early study of religions could be
accused of an elitist bias, and in the study of India this meant that the real
Hinduism could be found in Sanskrit texts.
This was perhaps most clearly formulated by the academic superstar Fried-
rich Max Müller (1823–1900), who was professor of comparative philology at
the University of Oxford and a friend of several Hindu leaders of his day. Max
Müller created the important book series called The Sacred Books of the East,
in which religious texts from India and China were presented to the Western
public in English translation. He was also among the key figures behind the
creation of a new world of academic Orientalist congresses and journals aimed
at understanding the cultures of the world east of the Bosporus. A lesson to
be drawn from the history of the disciplines that study Hinduism and
other religions could be that we are—as scholars, students, or just interested
readers—implicated in the reification and standardization of religion.
Processes of reification and standardization have not stopped after Indian
independence in 1947. Major public institutions—such as schools, hospitals,
prisons, and the military—have emerged as an important focus for research in
the sociological study of modern religion in the Western world. The inter-
actions between religion and Indian public institutions have so far received

less attention and could be an interesting focus for more research about
modern Hinduism and about how the modern state shapes religion. For
instance, the Indian army has established a corps of chaplains from the
recognized religions of the country, following a Western model, while still
nurturing deep-rooted, indigenous military (or ‘martial’) cultures of various
Indian ethnic and religious groups (Brekke 2016).
Since 1989, we have witnessed a rapid intensification in the forces that
compel religious organization to relate to each other in an emerging global
field of religion. The Internet is one technological precondition for this
development today. In a globalized religious environment there is also a
certain degree of conscious emulation taking place, in the sense that Hindu
movements and leaders take their cue from other religions in order to build
strong organizations. The Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), or the World Hindu
Council, a key organization for Hindu nationalism in India and in the
diaspora, has seen Semitic religions as a template for the reorganization and
strengthening of Hinduism. Founded in 1964 by the lawyer Shiv Shankar
Apte, the VHP has been concerned that Hinduism had no integrated structure
that can serve to unite Hindus under a common cultural and political identity,
and from the 1980s Hindu nationalists made important advances in the ways
they organized themselves. They often felt that the other religions in India
were threats to Hindu culture, and hence decided to emulate some of the
organizing principles of these—for instance, by building a novel ecclesiastical
structure. Processes of reification and standardization often have political
implications. Robert E. Frykenberg (1997: 82) is not alone among scholars
on India in claiming that the concept of Hinduism as a monolithic religious
community has done ‘enormous, even incalculable, damage’ to the peace and
security of the Indian political system.
Romila Thapar (1997) has pointed out that the emergence of what she calls
Syndicated Hinduism has been a process closely entwined with new political
and economic realities and the emergence of a new Indian middle class. She
notes that the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries are not the only period
when emerging social groups have expressed their aspirations by creating new
religious movements, or sects if you will. However, she points out that the novel
element in today’s India is the attempt to include and represent all Hindus
under the same banner of a monolithic world religion according to the template
of Christianity and Islam (Thapar 1997: 78–9). Class still plays a major role in
the continuous transformation of Hinduism, and this is reflected in several of
the chapters in this book, as when Katju discusses Hindu nationalism and its
relation to the middle class, or when Frøystad explores why New Age Hinduism
took off among urban middle-class Hindus from the 1990s onwards.
The standardized Vedānta that often becomes shorthand for modern
Hinduism was rooted from its beginnings in a particular socio-economic
segment of Indian society (Fuller 2009). In Bengal, where much of the social
8 Torkel Brekke
and religious reforms started, this new class was commonly referred to
as the bhadralok—literally, the good people. An important aspect of the
development of modern Hinduism is the shift in cultural authority away
from traditional centres to this new class. The bhadralok was a social group
held together by certain cultural and economic aspirations, with a view of
themselves as being a significant factor in the life of the colonial metropolis
(Mukherjee 1976).
Many talented and highly influential representatives of the Hindu middle
class that emerged in Bengal from the 1830s onwards identified with what has
been called a bourgeois Vedānta (Hatcher 2007). This was a type of Vedānta
that matched the aspirations and lifestyles of the middle classes: the rejection
of world renunciation and the embrace of worldly initiative, business, and
secular education. It is important to acknowledge the role of modern educa-
tion in the cultural and religious transformations taking place in India, starting
approximately from the middle of the nineteenth century. To a certain extent,
the remaking and reform of Hinduism that started in this period was driven by
students in higher education, with debates on religious reform often taking
place in the colleges and universities that were established in the period. From
the second half of the nineteenth century, there emerged a new social group in
Bengal, particularly in Calcutta, that consisted of students enrolled in educa-
tional institutions where English was the medium of instruction and the
subjects taught were ‘modern’. Science, economics, engineering, history, and
law were taught according to British standards and concepts. In the 1880s
there were over 3,000 of these modern college students in Bengal (which
mainly meant Calcutta); in 1904 the number had grown to almost 10,000,
and between 1875 and 1921 as many as 200,000 Bengalis passed the entrance
examination to the colleges of this part of India (Berwick 1995). They were
overwhelmingly Hindus (Muslims were underrepresented), and they mostly
belonged to the higher castes of Bengali society. This was a very important
group, politically and culturally, and here the reformers could find like-
minded peers and venues for debating new ideas. It is perhaps no coincidence
that at the time of writing this introduction—in 2018—important contest-
ations about the nature of Hinduism take place on university campuses and
among students in India.
THE CONTRIBUTIONS
This volume is divided into three parts. The first part looks at the historical
background to modern conceptualizations of Hinduism. In Chapter 1, Adrian
Plau maps deep transformations in Hinduism from the late fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries. That is the beginning of what is now commonly referred

to as the early modern period, when novel modes of devotion emerged in
Indian religiosity, altering the relationship between devotee and deity, and
sometimes also the devotee’s social identity. New patterns of organization
arose, and vernacular languages acquired new cultural roles. These changes
allowed religious movements to define themselves as belonging to a family of
religious traditions, thus contributing to new ideas of a common Hindu
identity. Plau looks at key figures, such as Kabīr, Nānak, Caitanya, Sūrdās,
Mīrābāī, and Tulsīdās, and employs the concepts of bhakti, organization, and
language, highlighting the unique interrelations between these elements in
early modern India, as well as how they allowed for unprecedented shifts in
religious cultures. The developments described by Plau point in the direction
of a basic question also already discussed: what does the emergence of a
distinct Hindu identity in the early modern period mean for the question of
whether Hinduism itself is a modern construct? Plau shows how popular
religious traditions emerging in the early modern period provide us with
unique sources of insight into the imagination of modern Hinduism.
In Chapter 2, Dermot Killingley does two things that are important to create a
starting point from which to think about modern Hinduism. First, he gives a
broad overview of the fundamental transformations that took place in the
politics, economy, education, and cultural life of Bengal at the end of the
eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. This part of India
was exposed to British colonialism first, and this is where many of the political
and intellectual reactions to the colonial situation, and to other forces of global-
ization, would start. Secondly, Killingley provides an introduction to the life and
work of Rammohun Roy, situating this great intellectual in the transformative
period of India’s history called the ‘Bengal renaissance’. Roy was perhaps the
most important figure in the transmission of religious and philosophical ideas
between India and the Western world in the early nineteenth century. Killingley
points out that Rammohun Roy, although critical to a number of socially
undesirable practices, never rejected Hinduism, showing his contemporaries
that one can indeed be a Hindu in a modern and international environment.
In Chapter 3, Hans Harder looks at the contributions of Bankimchandra
Chattopadhyay (1838–94), an important Bengali intellectual and writer, and
discusses his key writings relevant to modern Hinduism. Bankimchandra was
primarily an author—and not an organization-builder—and it was through
his writings that he influenced younger generations of Hindu reformers and
Indian nationalists. Bankimchandra merits a chapter in this volume not least
because of his early and sophisticated attempts to define Hinduism, and, as
Harder highlights, his reinterpretation of dharma as both equivalent and a
counter-concept to ‘religion’, as well as his claim of inherent spirituality and
tolerance being distinctive features of Hinduism.
The Hindu and Bengali renaissance of the nineteenth century placed
emphasis on reason and rationality, a corollary being that it often entailed a
10 Torkel Brekke
rejection of iconic bhakti because it was an emotional strand of Hinduism
centred on a personal god, seen as the opposite of a modern and rational
Hinduism. However, the religious current represented by Bhaktisiddhānta
Sarasvatī (1874–1936) and the institution that he founded in 1918, the
Gauḍiya Math and Mission, generated a renewed interest in bhakti religiosity.
In Chapter 4, Ferdinando Sardella gives an introduction to this religious
innovator and his important legacy of a growing, missionary form of Hinduism.
The chapter provides an overview of the life of Bhaktisiddhānta and a brief
history of his movement, which includes one of its most prominent inter-
national offshoots, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness,
popularly known as the Hare Krishna movement.
Moving away from the reforms of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, the next part of the book contains five chapters each presenting
key developments and changes in religious practice in modern Hinduism. In
Chapter 5, Tanisha Ramachandran looks at how modern techniques in the
creation of religious images have changed the religious values and practices of
the mūrti, the image. Her chapter illustrates how the Hindu image takes on
multiple meanings and functions. Analysing processes of sacralization, politi-
cization, display, appropriation, commoditization, and protest at various
points in history, Ramachandran looks at how the Hindu image has been
signified and resignified by Hindus and non-Hindus. Hindu images serve a
multitude of purposes in religious, social, political, artistic, as well as com-
mercial realms. Ramachandran also discusses how Hindu images are invested
with new meaning with the rise of religion on the Internet. On this point her
chapter may profitably be read in conjunction with the chapter by Scheifinger.
In Chapter 6, Gayatri Chatterjee looks at how issues of modernity and
Hinduism have been treated in a key modern medium: film. Chatterjee
looks closely at several important Indian films that all reveal changing ideas
on the place of Hinduism in modern India. Several of these films are historical.
For instance, Rammohun Roy, the subject of Killingley’s chapter, is the hero in
the 1965 film bearing his name. It shows the reformer as an enlightened man
fighting social ills, insisting that Hinduism should exist peacefully with Islam,
while, according to Chatterjee, the portrayal also glosses over several other,
and important, aspects of his life. The social and religious movements of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries inspired a large body of Indian films
in the early decades of Indian cinema, and these are one of the main foci of
Chatterjee’s chapter.
Tourism as we know it is a product of modernity, but what happens when
tourism meets the ancient Hindu tradition of pilgrimage? In Chapter 7, Knut
Aukland shows how Indian modernity has stimulated Hindu pilgrimage in
multiple ways and how modern tourism has helped it grow in popularity. The
tourism industry has introduced travel agencies, hotels, tourist guides, and
guidebooks to the pilgrimage sites and routes, and these have to some extent

caused a decrease in the demand for traditional ritual services. Pilgrims spend
less time at one particular site and often expect to combine pilgrimage with
other types of travel, such as sightseeing or visiting theme parks. In the face of
these changes, some priests have adapted by collaborating with tourist agen-
cies and drivers, joining the tourism trade and catering to foreign tourists.
A modern literary genre has emerged combining elements of the traditional
pilgrimage texts with modern tourist information. The Indian state is a major
player in shaping the operation of Hindu pilgrimage under the banner of
tourism development.
In Chapter 8, Kathinka Frøystad builds on her own fieldwork to explain the
rise of New Age Hinduism in India from the 1990s. What are the reasons for
the mushrooming of these new religious practices at this particular time in
history, Frøystad asks, suggesting that the reasons may be found in deep
transformations in India’s economy and its labour market, as well as in society
at large. These changes created a demand for spiritualized self-development
techniques. New gurus and new systems of thought and practice helped the
Indian middle class adjust to these transformations.
Technological change is a fundamental element of modernity, and an
exploration of modern Hinduism must take seriously the role of technology
in religious transformation. While the nineteenth century saw the introduc-
tion of the printing press as a new tool for mass mobilization, the Internet has
become a new technological platform for religious innovation and transform-
ation. In Chapter 9, Heinz Scheifinger gives an introduction to the topic of
Hinduism online. He starts by giving a brief overview of the short history
of Hinduism online, with the first movements and temples establishing a
presence on the World Wide Web from the mid-1990s. Focusing on the
core concept of pūjā, Scheifinger argues that online Hinduism and the wider
Hindu tradition are so closely linked that it makes little sense to see the online
and the offline as separate realms. In fact, online Hinduism is an integral part
of contemporary Hinduism, and the Internet has already spurred interesting
questions and dilemmas of theology and religious authority in the Hindu
tradition and will certainly continue to do so.
A key characteristic of modern Hinduism is its interaction with forces of
globalization, and nowhere is this more evident than in the migration of
Indians, especially with the introduction of indentured labour from the mid-
nineteenth century. In Chapter 10, Vineeta Sinha writes about the modern
Hindu diaspora. The Hindu diaspora is large and influential, and it may seem
odd that a volume about modern Hinduism does not have more chapters on
aspects of diaspora life and the interaction between diasporic Hinduism and
India. The reason for this is that the series of which this volume is a part has a
separate volume dedicated to the Hindu diaspora.
In Part 3 of the book we move to issues of politics, ethics, and law. This part
contains chapters that map and explain the powerful legal and political contexts
12 Torkel Brekke
created by the modern state—first the colonial government and then the
Indian Republic—which have shaped Hinduism in new ways. In Chapter 11,
Manjari Katju presents the history of Hindu nationalism, starting in the early
twentieth century. She goes into the Hindutva ideology of Savarkar, Golwalkar,
and other ideologues, and gives a history of key organizations such as the Hindu
Mahasabha, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Vishwa Hindu Parishad
(VHP), and the political party presently ruling India, the Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP). Katju’s chapter gives a broad background to some of the most
difficult debates about Hindu identity today—debates about ethno-religious
chauvinism and about the prospects for peaceful coexistence of Hindus,
Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, and other groups in India.
Religion is certainly not the only potential dividing line in modern India,
and, in Chapter 12, Divya Vaid and Ankur Datta investigate the complex issue
of caste and its relationship to modern Hinduism. Their chapter starts by
drawing up a broad canvas of classical theories about caste from sociology and
anthropology, considering caste in relation to the sanskritic concepts of varna
and jati. The authors then move on to the emergence of caste in its modern
form in the colonial period, looking in particular at the role of Dalit leader
B. R. Ambedkar, and Dalit politics more generally. The chapter also discusses
caste in relation to work and occupation, tracing the transformation of caste in
the face of contemporary socio-economic change. Vaid and Datta’s discussion
of the emergence of a modern conception of caste in the colonial period
converges with what has already been discussed concerning the ‘invention’
or ‘standardization’ of Hinduism. Caste as a modern formation was largely
shaped in the period of British colonial rule in India, the authors state, and the
construction of modern caste was accompanied by the larger framing of
Hinduism as a modern religion.
In Chapter 13, Werner Menski looks at how the Indian state grapples with
the issue of Hindu law. Menski engages with both colonial and postcolonial
times as he digs into the complex relationships between law and religion, and
the impact of state regulation on Hindu law in India. The key question to
Menski is whether colonial and postcolonial legal interventions have turned
‘Hindu law’ into something that is far removed from the lived realities of
India’s Hindu population. As Hindus in India often continue to live by
customary norms and ethics, rather than following modern state law, signifi-
cant discrepancies between formal law and the ‘living law’ exist. Menski
suggests that ‘the right law’ for India today is a culture-specific, hybrid, plural
construct containing Hindu elements.
Contemporary India faces serious challenges concerning the environment
and sustainability, and it is only natural that modern religious leaders should
address such issues. In Chapter 14, Pankaj Jain discusses environmentalism in
modern Hinduism. With an acknowledgement that some of the key ideas can
be traced far back in the history of Hindu ethics, the focus of the chapter is on

present-day activism and debates. Jain looks at several Hindu groups but gives
particular attention to the environmental work of Bishnois and Swadhyayis.
He notes that, while many modern urban Hindu organizations have included
environmentalism in their agendas, the majority of rural Hindu communities
are yet to wake up to modern environmental movements, which started after
the 1970s. Most of the Hindu organizations starting out in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries are responding to ecological problems with modern
means, often similar to Western-style activism.
In Chapter 15, David Gellner and Chiara Letizia look at Hinduism in
Nepal. Since its creation in the mid-eighteenth century, the state of Nepal
has claimed to be the only true Hindu kingdom in the world. Gellner and
Letizia show how the assertion of Nepal’s Hindu identity became an explicit
and politicized state strategy in the decades between 1960 and 1990, and how
the definition of the state as Hindu was challenged after 1990, culminating in
the declaration of secularism in the aftermath of the civil war between 1996
and 2006. The authors offer a lot of details on how the concept of secularism
itself became a main bone of contention in debates between the secularists
and defenders of Hinduism. These debates have clear parallels in Indian
debates about the position of Hinduism in the legal and political framework
of the state, and this is one of the reasons why Gellner and Letizia’s chapter
is instructive for a broad understanding of Hinduism’s relationship to
modern states. The Nepali constitution of 2015 institutionalizes a shift in
the understanding of Hinduism. Hinduism today is beginning to be concep-
tualized as one religion among many rather than as a collective and inherited
identity.
REF E RENCES
Berwick, John (1995). ‘Chātra Samāj: The Significance of the Student Community in
Bengal c.1870–1922’, in Rajat Kanta Ray, Mind, Body and Society: Life and Mentality
in Colonial Bengal. Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 232–93.
Brekke, Torkel (1999). ‘The Conceptual Foundation of Missionary Hinduism’, Journal
of Religious History, 23/2: 203–14.
Brekke, Torkel (2002). Makers of Modern Indian Religions in the Late Nineteenth
Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brekke, Torkel (2016). ‘Religious Teachers in the Indian Army’, in Torkel Brekke
and Vladimir Tikhonov (eds), Military Chaplaincy in an Era of Religious Pluralism.
New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 15–39.
Dalmia, Vasudha (1997). The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bhāratendu
Hariśchandra and Nineteenth-Century Banaras. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Fitzgerald, Timothy (1990). ‘Hinduism and the “World Religion” Fallacy’, Religion, 20:
108–18.
14 Torkel Brekke
Frykenberg, Robert Eric (1997). ‘The Emergence of Modern “Hinduism” as a Concept
and as an Institution: A Reappraisal with Special Reference to South India’, in
Sontheimer and Kulke (1997), 82–107.
Fuller, Jason D. (2009). ‘Modern Hinduism and the Middle Class: Beyond Revivalism
in the Historiography of India’, Journal of Hindu Studies, 2/2: 160–78.
Hatcher, Brian A. (2007). ‘Bourgeois Vedānta: The Colonial Roots of Middle-Class
Hinduism’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 75/2 June), 298–323.
Hatcher, Brian A. (2016) (ed.). Hinduism in the Modern World. New York and
London: Routledge.
Inden, Ronald (1990). Imagining India. Oxford: Blackwell.
Jones, Kenneth (1976). Arya Dharma: Hindu Consciousness in 19th-Century Punjab.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
King, Richard (1999). Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and the
Mythic East. London and New York: Routledge.
Masuzawa, Tomoko (2005). The Invention of World Religions. Chicago: Chicago
University Press.
Mukherjee, S. N. (1976). ‘Bhadralok in Bengali Language’, Bengal, Past and Present,
15/11: 226–37.
Pennington, Brian K. (2005). Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the
Colonial Construction of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press.
Smith, David (2003). Hinduism and Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell.
Smith, Frederick M. (2016). ‘Vedic Sacrifice in Modern India’, in Hatcher (2016),
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Sontheimer, Günther-Dietz, and Hermann Kulke (1997) (eds). Hinduism Recon-
sidered. New Delhi: Manohar.
Sweetman, Will (2003). ‘ “Hinduism” and the History of “Religion”: Protestant Pre-
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Study of Religion, 15: 329–53.
Thapar, Romila (1997). ‘Syndicated Hinduism’, in Sontheimer and Kulke (1997),
54–81.
White, David Gordon (2006). Kiss of the Yogini: ‘Tantric Sex’ in its South Asian
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Orthodoxy in Colonial India’, Religion, 31/2: 109–23.
Part 1
Early Hindu Reformers
and Reform Movements
Early Modern Hinduism

Adrian Plau
This chapter maps the transformations that took place within and around
Hinduism from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, which form the
beginning of what is now commonly referred to as the early modern period.¹
So what was new and particular about the historical development of Hinduism
at this time?² New modes of devotion emerged, altering the relationship
between devotee and deity, and sometimes also the devotee’s social identity;
new patterns of organization arose, allowing different sects and movements to
define themselves as belonging to an interrelated family of religious traditions,
and contributing to new ideas of Hindu identity; the rise of a range of
devotional literatures in multiple vernacular languages allowed the new
developments to attain a level of broad social influence beyond that of the
Sanskrit high tradition, and many of the poets and texts spearheading this
development still retain an important position in the modern practices and
popular imagination of Hinduism. By building on previously established
narratives on religious, literary, and intellectual movements during this
period, I will outline these developments under the analytic concepts of bhakti,
organization, and language, highlighting the unique interrelations between
these elements in early modern India and how they allowed for unprecedented
¹ At every stage of my work with this chapter, I have benefited immensely from discussions
with Emilia Bachrach, who also generously read and commented on its every iteration. I am
deeply grateful to have had the benefit of her expertise and patience. I also owe debts of gratitude
to Yan Jia, Maddalena Italia, and Francesca Orsini, all of whom provided important feedback
and perspective. Any errors are my responsibility.
² In the South Asian context, Dalmia and Faruqui (2014a) have noted that prime indicators of
early modernity included improving mobility and communications, both within the region and
in terms of international trade, and growing wealth and monetization. Ali (2012) traces the rise
of the concept of the ‘early modern’ in South Asia studies, especially in its relation to the
‘medieval’, and warns against teleological tendencies to construe the ‘early modern’ as simply
a prologue to the ‘modern’.
18 Adrian Plau
shifts in its religious cultures. I will also discuss several key figures, such as
Kabīr, Nānak, Vallabha, Caitanya, Sūrdās, Mīrābāī, and Tulsīdās, around
whom distinct Hindu traditions were formed and contributed to what have
become shared articulations of Hindu, and specifically bhakti³ identity in the
early modern period and beyond.
This state of things opens the door for another question: Does the emer-
gence of a distinct Hindu identity in the early modern period have repercus-
sions for the question of whether Hinduism itself is a modern construct? To
what extent can we really speak of an early modern ‘Hinduism’? As we shall
see, this question is difficult to answer fully, owing not only to the variety and
extent of data available, but also to how influential readings of these data have
formed the foundations of diverse modern agendas and outlooks in both
colonial and postcolonial India. The perspectives of scholarship and popular
tradition can differ dramatically. Yet, rather than see the twain as incompat-
ible, I will here attempt to show that popular traditions that emerged against
the backdrop of early modern developments may be approached as unique
sources of insight into the imagination of modern Hinduism.
Much must be excluded. Fully surveying all of the movements, individuals,
and localities that drove these processes, spanning several centuries and a
range of geographical and linguistic boundaries, is not possible within a single
chapter; individual agents will have to stand for multitudes, and much of my
focus is restricted to North India. Yet I do believe that singling out certain key
figures, even to the exclusion of others, allows us to ‘zoom in’ from a bird’s-eye
view of the period, to consider how the elements under discussion could come
together in particular instances, enabling us to approach the changing face of
early modern Hinduism at close quarters.
KEY CONCEPTS
Bhakti: Continuities, Innovations, Movements
For many students of Hinduism, its early modern history is almost synonym-
ous with the concept of bhakti. The word itself derives from the Sanskrit verbal
root bhaj (‘to share; to partake’) and has come to denote a particular form of
religious devotion that emphasizes the devotee’s personal and direct emotional
engagement with the deity. It is also commonly subdivided into sagun and
nirgun: (‘with/without qualities’) forms. The former encompasses devotion to a
deity’s particular form and character, such as those of the familiar Hindu gods,
³ Refer to the bhakti section for a discussion of this key concept.

Early Modern Hinduism 19

while the latter refers to devotion to a divine principle that remains beyond the
scope of attributes—though the two may and do overlap.⁴
Yet the concept of bhakti is older than early modernity: It appears as an
abstract idea already in pre- texts, and the early  Bhagavad Gītā speaks of
how the devotee may employ bhakti devotion in ritual practice.⁵ So how did
bhakti come to be representative of early modern Hinduism? Or, in other
terms, what was new and special about how bhakti came to be formulated in
the early modern period? We must approach these questions through the lens
of another concept, for the idea of bhakti cannot be disentangled from the
equally influential notion of a ‘bhakti movement’, and so any discussion of
early modern bhakti will do well by tracing the narrative of the bhakti
movement and the debates it has engendered.
The bhakti movement is generally credited with spreading the notion and
practice of bhakti as a form of devotion open to individuals from across
religious and social spectres. By refocusing the dynamics of devotion from
the guarded rituals and hierarchies of earlier, Brahmanic traditions over to the
individual devotee’s direct rapport with the deity, often through the guiding
example of supremely gifted innovators, this conception of bhakti is thought
to have opened previously closed doors to women and low-caste men. The
established narrative dictates that the movement arose among the Ā:lvār saints
of South India by the seventh century and then travelled across the subcon-
tinent, culminating in the full blossoming of a range of bhakti theologians,
poets, and pilgrimage centres throughout the north from the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries of the early modern era onwards. This narrative has proven
enormously influential even into modern days, and may have given rise to the
tendency to see early modern Hindu traditions as constituting a relatively
uniform reform movement, solidifying Hinduism against various non-Hindu
agents—an idea that was well received within the context of pre-independence
India.⁶ Yet recent scholarship has contested the idea of a unified bhakti
movement spreading across India and climaxing with an early modern for-
mulation of Hindu unity and egalitarianism.
In a landmark study of the idea of the bhakti movement, Hawley (2015)
argues that the architectural and literary records indicate that the defining
blossoming of bhakti in early modern North India should be understood as an
expression of circumstances particular to that time and place. The rise of new
⁴ The dichotomy between sagun and nirgun: bhakti and its implications for how we should
approach early modern Hinduism is the subject of much debate. Sharma (1987) warns against a
traditional tendency to view only sagun forms of devotion as emblematic of bhakti. Hawley
(2005) suggests that the distinction was less clear cut in the period itself than it was to later
commentators.
⁵ Lorenzen (1995) gives an overview of the various appearances of bhakti in early Sanskrit
literature.
⁶ For an in-depth discussion of the central influence of early twentieth-century nationalist
scholars of Hindi on the modern concept of the bhakti movement, see Hawley (2015: 230–84).
20 Adrian Plau
and defining pilgrimage centres in the Braj region of today’s western Uttar
Pradesh was the result of Mughal patronage on an unprecedented scale, which
was reflected in the Mughal-inspired architecture of the new temples. And
bhakti itself was not unique to the Hindu traditions of early modern North
India. Cort (2002) points to the presence of bhakti within Jainism already from
the early centuries of the Common Era, and Jains of West and North India
wrote much bhakti poetry in vernacular languages throughout the early mod-
ern period. Similarly, bhakti was an important ingredient in the formation of
Sikhism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Guru Granth Sahib
contains works written by poets that were influential to the rise of vernacular
bhakti poetry, but not necessarily Sikhs themselves, such as Sūrdās and Kabīr.
Finally, we should not overlook the importance of Islamic and Sufi ideas of
devotionalism and literary aesthetics in the formulation of early modern
bhakti. Behl (2007) has demonstrated how some widely popular Hindu bhakti
texts, like Tulsīdās’s Rāmcaritmānas, were deeply influenced by the literary
tradition of Sufi romances. Combined, these elements suggest that bhakti in
the early modern period was a mode of religious devotion that was manifested
across a wide spectre of religious traditions.
Hawley’s study further argues that the first, defining texts linking the
northern outpouring of Hindu bhakti with earlier, southern streams in the
shape of a unitary movement, such as the Bhāgavata Māhātmya, were written
by northern Brahmans in the late early modern period. Against a backdrop of
multi-religious patterns of patronage and cultural exchange, there clearly was
a drive to erect a streamlined narrative of explicitly Hindu bhakti that carried
the legitimacy and authority of earlier, southern traditions. So, what was
distinct to early modern Hindu bhakti was that, on the one hand, it evolved
within a multifaceted context, and, on the other hand, it increasingly sought to
define its own narrative of development within strictly Hindu terms. More-
over, this revised view, unlike the traditional perspective, does not see the
emergence of early modern bhakti as a medieval, historical process of reform
movements that bridge the gap between the modern and the pre- and early
medieval, but rather as one that is wholly defined by its early modern context.
Rather than speak of a bhakti movement, Hawley (2015) suggests that we
may speak of ‘movements’ in the plural, or even of ‘networks’ of bhakti.
Understanding how these networks or movements of bhakti increasingly
began to identify under the same general banner of a distinct Hindu bhakti
identity throughout the early modern period requires us to move to our next
key concept—that of organization.
Organization: Sampradāy, Rearticulations, Patronage
An almost equally influential concept to the study of early modern Hinduism

as the thought of a unitary bhakti movement is that of the four sampradāys.

Like bhakti, the word sampradāy itself, denoting an organizational lineage
protected and handed down from teacher to student, pre-dates the early
modern period. What was new about sampradāy in the early modern period
was the idea of four separate sampradāys arising in North India, all of them
:
Vais: nava, that were spiritual continuations of four earlier sampradāys of
South India. If the bhakti movement was the vehicle of the spread of Hindu
bhakti throughout India, the four sampradāys supplied its organizational
skeleton. Hawley (2015) has also questioned the historical foundations of
the four sampradāy scheme. Tracing its formulations through a series of
North Indian texts of the early modern period, he concludes that it was
given definite shape in the first half of the eighteenth century following
the royal patronage bestowed on the idea of Vais: nava : bhakti and its institu-
tionalized forms by Raja Savāī Jaisingh (1699–1743), king of the Kachvaha
kingdom in today’s Rajasthan and founder of the modern city of Jaipur. But,
even if the neat scheme of four sampradāys then emerges as a distinctly early
modern notion, arising from early modern needs, Hawley’s research still
points to the importance of the various sampradāys that arose in the period
and their relationships of patronage and dialogue with new authorities. I will
here discuss both of these elements in turn, by focusing on how they came to
be expressed in the aforementioned developments in the Braj region.
While not being a formal geographical delineation, ‘Braj’ is commonly
taken to encompass the cities of Vrindavan and Mathura and their surround-
ing countryside. The image of the young, flute-playing Kr: s: na : who grows up in
the Braj cow-herder community was first depicted in Sanskrit literature, most
famously in the (most likely eighth- or ninth- century) Bhāgavata Purāna, : and
is today an instantly recognizable Hindu deity. But the Braj region was not
established as a site for Kr: s: na
: worship until the early sixteenth century, at the
start of the early modern period.⁷ It was then a hotbed for a variety of new
:
Vais: nava bhakti movements, all of which could be identified as sampradāys.
Bachrach (2014) notes that, although they diverged in specifics, and especially
on points of Kr: s: na
: theology, they all understood themselves according to their
own traditions as having been established by Brahmin preceptors. They were
also similar in that they all claimed to offer organized bhakti practice to lower-
caste individuals. A main vehicle for these sampradāys’ delineation of their
respective identities was the writing of hagiographies. This literature would
recount the lives of the sampradāys’ founders and exemplar members, often in
vernacular languages and in clearly didactic terms. Moreover, the ritual and
theological importance of the Braj region prompted some Kr: s: na-oriented
:
⁷ A landmark work by Vaudeville (1976) showed that identifying the various sites throughout
the Braj region where the episodes of Kr: s: na’s
: childhood and youth were to have played out was
conceived of as an act not of discovery but of remembrance. The sites had always been there, and
only temporarily been forgotten or lost. This reminds us of how the narrative of tying early
modern developments with earlier models is a recurring feature of the period.
22 Adrian Plau
sampradāys that did not originate there, such as the Bengal-based Gauḍiya
:
Vais: nava sampradāy, to extend symbolic links between their homelands and
Braj. This could be done by sending disciples there or by expressing their
spiritual proximity to Braj both through ritual practice and by writing devo-
tional literature. So in these Braj-centred sampradāys we see several elements
working together: new organizations arose that promulgated the socially
radical egalitarianism of bhakti, but at the same time retained the classical
emphasis on Brahmanical roots and guidance; through their hagiographical
writings, these organizations increasingly constructed distinct identities, both
against each other and against non-Hindu religious communities; their shared
affinity with the Braj region meant that they partook in an emerging sense of
general Hindu identity that spread across different parts of India.
Yet this crystallization of distinct sectarian Hindu identities in early modern
Braj must also be understood with reference to the sampradāys’ relations with
their political patrons. The cities and countryside of sixteenth-century Braj
found themselves perched on the main route between Delhi and Agra, main
cities of the recently established Mughal empire. Many of the grand temple-
building projects in the region at this time, stimulated by the influx of
:
Vais: nava bhakti pioneers, were supported by the patronage and land grants
of first the Mughals, and then increasingly their Hindu Rajput servants, most
prominently the Kachvahas, reflecting the dynamics of a complex relationship
of power (Entwistle 1987). Pauwels (2009) provides an example of how these
patterns of patronage could reflect early modern formulations of bhakti.
Madhukar Shāh ruled over the Bundelā kingdom in today’s Madhya Pradesh
province for most of the second half of the sixteenth century. Madhukar was
:
also the patron of the Vais: nava bhakti poet Harirām Vyās, who hailed from
the same region but later settled in Vrindavan in Braj, and had bhakti-oriented
temples erected in his home town of Orchha. A variety of sources indicate how
Madhukar’s position towards the Mughals shifted between outright defiance,
provoking multiple Mughal field campaigns, and vassalage. Within this ten-
sion, Madhukar seems to have made pragmatic use of the reputation that came
with his bhakti patronage, both to express spiritual and, in extension, military
independence from Mughal overlordship and to strengthen his position
among competing warlords, such as the aforementioned Kachvahas, and
within his own royal house. In this complex political field, emerging as a
strong patron of bhakti could express both identity, in being eulogized by
bhakti devotees, and power, in erecting highly visible temples in popular
pilgrimage sites.⁸ Madhukar’s expertise in employing bhakti patronage for
⁸ Madhukar’s son, Vīr Singh Dev, went on to construct a temple in Mathura in Braj itself that
dominated the city for several decades. Pauwels (2012) notes how Vīr Singh’s temple-building
activities served both to set him up as an ideal, dharma-heeding king, despite the questionable
circumstances of his accession, and to establish his position among the Hindu noblemen in the

these ends seems to have prompted Harirām Vyās gently to chastise him for
clinging to a far too worldly mode of bhakti.
To recap, we see in the Braj example several elements come together: the
emergence of sampradāys whose leaders were increasingly willing both to see
themselves as distinct and as part of the same, overarching identity; how
presence in and affinity with sites of bhakti activity could bestow a similar
identity to patrons; and that the message of egalitarian bhakti, and the
identities that potentially came with it, could not always be disentangled
from familiar patterns of caste- or power-based hierarchies.⁹ These interrela-
tions between different spheres of activity and their import on early modern
Hinduism also shape the debates surrounding the key concept of language.
Language: Vernaculars, Literatures, Multilingualism
A recurring element in discussions of early modern Hinduism is the role of

language in the formulation, dissemination, and popularization of the new,
devotional ideas. The fourteenth to eighteenth centuries saw the rise of a wide
range of vernacular languages, enabling poets and sectarian leaders to propa-
gate their ideas to a broader populace than that reached by Sanskrit literature,
and the enduring appeal of devotional poetry written throughout this period
indicates the broad influence of bhakti in early modern Hinduism and other
South Asian religions. Several of the widely spoken languages of today’s India,
such as Hindi and Gujarati, are popularly understood to trace their beginnings
to this emergence of vernacular, devotional poetry. Yet the emergence of
vernacular languages in the South Asian context was a complex process that,
in addition to the religious ramifications that primarily occupy us here, also
involved both social and political elements, and these elements cannot be
disentangled from the others. The same goes for the relationships between the
languages themselves; recent scholarship has demonstrated how these con-
nections can illuminate the flow of religious ideas and literary practices
between different agents, groups, and sites of early modern South Asia, and
it is now difficult to understand the great figures of bhakti poetry without
taking their multilingualism into account.
A hugely influential study on the emergence of vernaculars in South Asia is
Pollock’s monumental The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (2006).
Here Pollock employs a conceptual distinction between ‘literization’, the
process whereby a language comes to be written down in texts of various
genres, and ‘literarization’, when a language begins to be used for wholly
service of Jahāngīr, the new Mughal emperor. Again, religious patronage served multiple
purposes.
⁹ Refer to the initiators section for information on specific sampradāys.
24 Adrian Plau
literary purposes, as opposed to everyday, prosaic texts, such as basic docu-
mentation or recording of state affairs. The latter stage is dependent on the
former and to Pollock they are both necessary prerequisites for the emergence
of vernacular languages with any degree of cultural and political influence.
Pollock’s analysis is grounded in the conceptual understanding of ‘literature’
that actually was current in the period he studies; while songs and other
popular forms existed, only the particular genres of kāvya (‘ornate poetry’)
and praśasti (‘royal panegyric’) were conceived of as ‘literature’ per se, and
both genres were primarily developed and practised under royal patronage,
with all the connotations of power that came with it. Reviewing a wide variety
of material, especially focusing on the emergence of a vernacular Kannada
literature in medieval Karnataka, Pollock argues that the vernacular languages
of medieval and early modern South Asia, by making use of the genres and
stylistic features of the transcultural, cosmopolitan Sanskrit language, such as
the kāvya and praśasti genres, also acquired some of the prestige of that elite
language and gradually came to supplant it as vehicles of cultural and political
influence and power, becoming ‘cosmopolitan vernaculars’.
Pollock’s study has been met with vigorous debate. In a study of its
applicability to the emergence of Hindi, Busch (2011) points out that the
first major early Hindi text, the Candāyan (‘The Story of Candā’) by Maulana
Daud from 1379, is as much influenced by Persian narrative poetry (mas: navī) :
as it is by Sanskrit poetics, and consequently falls beyond the scope of Pollock’s
‘cosmopolitan vernacular’ scheme. This is significant, since the Candāyan, as
mentioned in the bhakti section, was an important influence on the later
Rāmcaritmānas, one of the most influential Hindu bhakti poems of early
modern India. Busch also notes that, while the poet Keśavdās, who was active
at the turn of the seventeenth century in the court of Orchha (which we have
met as a site of bhakti patronage) and wrote a series of works in Brajbhās: ā, a
literary precursor to modern Hindi that drew heavily on Sanskrit poetics, falls
perfectly within Pollock’s scheme, greatly influential bhakti poets such as
Sūrdās, who wrote popular songs (pad) and appears to have worked in a
devotional rather than a courtly setting, do not.
Similarly, Orsini (2012) argues that the literary culture of North India in
the early modern period was too diverse for Pollock’s court-oriented under-
standing of the concept fully to grasp the range of activities and influences.
There were multiple agents and sites of literary activity beyond the Sanskrit-
educated court poets, such as Muslims and Jains in madrasas, temples, and
private gatherings and bhakti devotees of various castes in emerging pil-
grimage centres; a range of genres beyond those of courtly kāvya and praśasti
circulated among these different literary domains; and the various domains
and settings included the use of different languages and scripts. What
emerges is a context for the rise of vernacular bhakti poetry in early modern
North India that was ‘multilingual and multi-locational’ (Orsini 2012: 238).

Finally, Truschke (2012) has explored how literary production in Sanskrit
was supported at the imperial Mughal court throughout the early modern
period, enabling the poetics and genres of Sanskrit literature to interact
with those of Persian. This indicates how the interplay and exchange inher-
ent in multilingualism was also played out at the centre of early modern
imperial politics.
So what these discussions have shown us that was particular to early
modern Hinduism is that it expressed radical ideas about devotion, and did
so both through new systems of patronage and the restructuring of hierarchies
as well as through devotional vehicles in newly literary vernaculars. What was
also particular was that these elements, on the one hand, drew on a variety of
linguistic, cultural, and religious impulses, and, on the other, sought to
establish new forms of delineations within this fluidity. In the following,
I will focus on a selection of figures who can be seen to represent different
aspects of these elements.
MAIN FIGU RES
Syncretists?: Kabīr, Nānak
As I have already noted in the introduction, the geographical and historical

scope of early modern Hinduism is broad indeed, spanning multiple centuries
and the diverse range of political and religious developments and their inter-
sections, over an equally broad range of geographical and political boundaries.
In the following overview, I can only hope to include some of the most salient
figures. An analytic aid when approaching these figures is to distinguish
between those who were the founders of formal traditions, such as sampradāys,
and those who gave rise to informal traditions, such as literary or hagiograph-
ical practices. This does not imply that founders of sampradāys could not be
influential poets, or that poets could not be part of sampradāys; there are
several examples of both. It does, however, reflect the diverse natures of the
early modern Hindu traditions, ranging from the intentionally established and
authoritatively guided to the (not less powerful) collaborative and decentred.
While an exhaustive overview of the salient figures of early modern Hinduism
remains beyond the scope of this chapter, I will in the following present some
of those agents who, in myriad ways, have proven to be influential even into the
modern era. To illustrate the diversity of early modern religious culture in
India, and the question of potential syncretism within this culture, I will begin
by looking at two figures who, to varying degrees, do not fall within ‘Hindu’
categories: Kabīr and Guru Nānak.
26 Adrian Plau
The low-caste weaver Kabīr was a hugely influential figure both in the early
stages of the rise of bhakti in North India and to the subsequent traditions.
Active in fifteenth-century Vārānasī,
: Kabīr is a prime example of the figure
of the sant (‘poet–saint’)—the religious virtuoso who is equally a poet. While
the early seventeenth-century hagiography Bhaktamāl (‘The Garland of
Devotees’) by Nābhādās sets Kabīr in a historical tradition stretching from
the fourteenth-century sant Rāmānand and all the way back to the Śrī
:
Vais: nava movement of the southern A:lvars, Hawley (2015) rather suggests
that Kabīr’s work, even while drawing on predecessors, in its originality and
distinctively early modern sentiment constituted something new, to which
succeeding traditions already from the early seventeenth century looked for
authority and authentication. Born into the Muslim julāhā community of
weavers, Kabīr formulated an ideal of bhakti devotion that stressed moral
integrity and mystical union with the divine over ritual and social strictures.
This emphasis on the individual devotee’s inner union with the divine resulted
in an utter rejection of organized religion, where even the very concepts of
‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ were dropped; Allah and Rām, Kabīr stated, are one and
the same to the innermost heart. In this, Kabīr can also be seen as an example
of nirgun: bhakti.¹⁰
An indication of Kabīr’s pansectarian influence is the many poems ascribed
to him that are included in the Guru Granth Sahib, the holy scripture of
Sikhism. Sikhism itself was founded by the Punjab-based sant Guru Nānak in
the fifteenth century. A near contemporary of Kabīr, Nānak also criticized the
sectarian categories of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’, but, unlike Kabīr, envisioned a
divine order (hukam) through which the true name (nām) of the divine is
revealed to the devotee who is prepared to listen. Understanding the concep-
tual and theological relationship between Kabīr and Nānak has not been
uncontroversial, and the endeavour can be illuminating to our broader ques-
tions about the establishment of a particular Hindu identity in the early
modern period. For instance, Prill (2005) points to how the question of
whether Nānak, like Kabīr, can be categorized as a sant hinges on whether
one understands sant to be a purely Hindu category and whether Nānak’s
status as the founding guru of Sikhism excludes him from being a sant as well.
McLeod (2000: 19–36) argues that the problem stems from the frequent
subsuming of the two under the general category of ‘syncretism’: While both
were critical of established religious categories in a manner that reveals their
common influences, their critiques led them in different directions. This
tension between shedding religious identities, as in Kabīr’s rejection of any
such identity, and erecting new ones, as in Guru Nānak’s inauguration of a
¹⁰ For a single volume offering translated examples of work by Kabīr and many of the other
figures discussed in this chapter, see Hawley and Juergensmeyer (1988).

completely new tradition, can also be seen as reactions to the increasing
prevalence of these identities in the early modern period.
Initiators of Sampradāys: Caitanya, Vallabha
I will here look at two initiators of distinct sampradāys, Caitanya (1486–1533)

and Vallabha (1479–1531). In many ways, they are similar: They were con-
temporaneous to each other, both initiated Vais: nava : bhakti lineages that
focused on the playful Kr: s: na
: of Vr: ndāvan,
: and they were both Brahmins.
But there are also differences: their theological stances diverged, they were
(mostly) far apart geographically, and their formal positions within their
respective traditions range from embodying the ideal devotee (Caitanya) to
the authoritative scholar (Vallabha). These elements were also central to the
ways in which the hagiographies that followed in the two founders’ wakes
shaped the identities of their traditions, and most of what we know about the
two, as with many other early modern figures, stem from such texts.¹¹ I discuss
them here to highlight how even ostensibly similar formal lineages established
in the early modern period could give rise to different ideas and practices, even
as they could be seen as partaking in the same general field, and to indicate the
importance of textual traditions in the establishment of sampradāys.
The bare bones of the received history of Caitanya’s life, as told by a
plethora of hagiographies in both Sanskrit and Bengali, inform us that he
was born in Navadvīpa in today’s West Bengal as the son of a learned Vais: nava :
Brahman. After receiving a traditional Sanskrit education and marrying twice
(his first wife dying prematurely), the then 22-year-old Caitanya seems to have
had a transformative religious experience while performing his father’s funeral
rites (śrāddha) in the city of Gayā. Having become an initiate of the guru
Īśvara Purī, Caitanya the Brahmanic householder returned to Navadvīpa as a
Kr: s: na
: devotee who publicly sang songs of praise (kīrtana). It was around this
practice of kīrtana that the sampradāy of Caitanya arose, which eventually
became known as the Gauḍiya Vais: nava : tradition. Yet Caitanya himself took
initiation as a renouncer and, following a series of pilgrimages around the
subcontinent, which included excursions to Vr: ndāvan,
: settled in Puri in the
modern-day state of Orissa, where he died. Caitanya left nothing behind to
guide his followers but a handful of Sanskrit verses, his own example as a
supreme bhakti devotee, and a commandment to six select disciples, known as
gosvāmīs, to settle in Vr: ndāvan,
: to develop Vr: ndāvan
: itself as a pilgrimage site,
and to develop the theology of Kr: s: na
: bhakti.
¹¹ Callewaert and Snell (1994) discuss the possibilities and challenges of approaching South
Asian hagiographical literature as sources to historical insight. Rather than recording factual
data, hagiographies may be understood as windows into traditions’ ways of self-identification.
28 Adrian Plau
Stewart (2010) has shown how the main vehicle used to erect a distinct
tradition of theology and ritual practice in this framework was that of hagi-
ography. The late-sixteenth–early seventeenth-century Caitanya Caritāmrta :
by Kr: s: nadāsa
: Kavirāja emerges as a hagiographical text, as it synthesizes the
diverse theological standpoints of Caitanya’s early followers into a uniform,
authoritative system.¹² And the natural position of Caitanya as the central
figure of this hagiographical literature not only reflects his status as the
founder of the Gauḍiya Vais: nava : tradition, but also the tradition’s distinct
understanding of Caitanya as being both Kr: s: na : and his lover Rādhā incarnate
in one. This, Stewart and Dimock (Kr: s: nadāsa,
: Stewart, and Dimock 1999: 8)
:
note, distinguishes the Vais: nava tradition of Bengal from all other forms of
:
Vais: nava devotion. The tradition remains popular in India and beyond. One of
its offshoots, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON),
founded in 1966 by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, is perhaps the most
well-known example of a modern-day sampradāy on the international scene.
We must also rely on hagiographical accounts when approaching the life
of Vallabha. Hailing from a Brahman family of today’s Andhra Pradesh,
Vallabha went on three major pilgrimage tours of India, during which many
of the events that would be formative to his theology and his sampradāy
occurred. These included identifying an essential form (svarūp) of Kr: s: na : in
Braj, which became known as Śrī Nāthjī and remains at the ritual core of the
sampradāy, and receiving instructions from Kr: s: na : to marry, which broke with
traditional Indian expectations of ascetic chastity for ambitious devotees
and established a patrilineal leadership for the sampradāy. Unlike Caitanya,
Vallabha left a range of theological treatises in Sanskrit. Here Vallabha sets out
his fundamental standpoint of śuddhādvaita (‘pure non-dualism’). According
to this framework, the world as it appears is real, and Kr: s: na : uses his own
power of illusion, māyāśakti, to shroud his immanence in it. The world we
experience through Kr: s: na’s
: illusion is the world of mundane (laukika) existence.
But Kr: s: na
: may, through the agency of his grace (anugraha), allow the devotee
knowledge of the fundamentally transcendental (alaukika) nature of reality.
But, in order to attain this grace, the devotee must purify his or her soul (jīva),
and only Vallabha or his male heirs may facilitate this process.¹³
Bachrach (2014) has pointed out that this latter element is explicitly stated
only in the hagiographical literature of the Pus: ti : Mārg. And, as in Caitanya’s
case, the hagiographies are central to the shaping of the sampradāy itself, by
providing models of ritual practice and exemplary devotion, effectively trans-
lating the theology of Vallabha’s writing into a practical framework in which
: is Kr: s: nadāsa,
¹² An accessible and thorough English translation of the Caitanya Caritāmrta :
Stewart, and Dimock (1999).
¹³ The standard introduction to the life, theology, and tradition of Vallabha is still Barz
(1976).

the sampradāy could take form. So, while both Caitanya and Vallabha may be
perceived as inaugurators of sectarian lineages, they were not necessarily their
founders in any formal sense. The establishment of distinct sectarian borders
and attainment of wide-scale popular support fell to their successors. Dalmia
(2014) has shown how the hagiographies could serve as vehicles of the demar-
cation between the emerging sampradāys. The vārtās of the Pus: ti : Mārg, for
:
instance, could openly ridicule other Vais: nava bhakti movements, and espe-
cially those whose teachings and practices closely resembled their own. Stewart
(2010) and Bachrach (2014) have demonstrated that hagiographical literature
may continue to play a defining role in the everyday life of contemporary
devotees; Pus: t:i Mārg communities in today’s Gujarat read and discuss this
literature in their homes, in the temples, and on Internet chat forums. These
‘grammars of tradition’ enable members of the sampradāys of Caitanya and
Vallabha to negotiate between the particularities of modern life and the teach-
ings of early modern initiators. What makes these initiators specifically early
modern is then how they drew on established modes of lineage traditions and
Sanskritic learning as they engaged with, and came to shape, new trends of
devotional religion, and how the traditions they initiated contributed to the
general tendency towards more clearly demarcated religious identities.
Literary and Devotional Figures: Sūrdās, Mīrābāī, Tulsīdās
Sūrdās is widely hailed as perhaps the most influential bhakti poet of early
modern North India, and especially within the field of vernacular Kr: s: na
: bhakti.
Writing in Brajbhāsā : in the early sixteenth century, Sūrdās is renowned for
the extraordinary skill, imaginative force, and strong sense of human emotion
he brings to familiar scenes of Kr: s: na’s
: childhood and youth among the cow-
herders of the rural Braj country. Many of the songs attributed to him are still
broadly popular throughout North India, and perhaps none more so than that
of the child Kr: s: na’s
: protestation to his foster mother that he did not eat of the
butter, even as she catches him with his face smeared with it—Maiyā Maim :
Nahim : Mākhan Khāyau (‘I didn’t eat the butter, mum!’).
The case of Sūrdās is instructive to many aspects of the study of early
modern Hinduism, such as the difficulties of attesting historical data and the
resulting differences between scholarly and devotional perspectives on histor-
ical figures, the dynamics of bhakti literary traditions arising from a singular
inaugurator, and the enduring influence of the pioneers of early modern
Hinduism in contemporary popular and devotional culture.
The main traditional source to Sūrdās’s life and work is the seventeenth-
century hagiographical text Caurāsī Vais: navan
: kī Vārtā (CVV), which details
the lives of the first eighty-four members of Vallabha’s Pus: t:i Mārg. The first
edition of the CVV is attributed to Vallabha’s grandson, Gokulnāth
30 Adrian Plau
(1551–1640), and a later and broadly popular commentary to Vallabha’s
great-nephew, Harirāy (1590–1715);¹⁴ it is now common to view both text
and commentary as a unified narrative. According to the CVV, Sūrdās was
born blind, but also with the divine gift of clairvoyance. After gaining local
fame for his special gift, Sūrdās finds that life is illusory and promptly moves to
the Braj country. Once there, Sūrdās again wins fame, this time for his
powerful songs of his sense of separation (viraha) from Kr: s: na.: But everything
changes when Sūrdās meets Vallabha. In accordance with his ontological
understanding of the world as a partial manifestation of the divine in which
the union between devotee and the divine is brought about by the active grace
(anugraha) of Kr: s: na,
: Vallabha challenges Sūrdās to move away from his sense
of separation to write life-affirming songs about Gopāla Kr: s: na : instead. This
challenge unleashes Sūrdās’s poetic talent, and he quickly grows to become
both a widely respected poet and, as he becomes a follower of Vallabha, a
central propagator of the tenets of Pus: ti
: Mārg. Consequently, Sūrdās’s many
poems on Kr: s: na’s
: childhood and youth in Braj are traditionally understood to
be vernacular translations or reworkings of the Sanskrit Bhāgavata Purāna, :
heavily influenced by Vallabha’s commentaries on that text (Gokulnāth and
Harirāy 1971: 400–42).
The arguments of recent scholarship stand in marked contrast to this
traditional account. Studies by Bryant (1978) and Hawley (1984, 2005, 2009)
have convincingly shown that the earliest layers of surviving manuscripts from
the sixteenth century, Sūrdās’s most likely lifetime, contain no indications of
Pus: ti
: Mārg influence. Moreover, the blindness referred to in the poems is
either of a wholly spiritual kind or of old age—the latter case effectively
emphasizing that the poet had sight to lose. All that remains to be known is
that Sūrdās must have lived in the early sixteenth century, that he was
reasonably well known in parts of North India, and that he had little to no
formal affiliations with the Pus: t:i Mārg.
This perspective is reflected in Bryant and Hawley’s recent publication
(Sūrdās 2015) of a critical edition with translation of the 433 poems that
may be attributed to the historical Sūrdās. In contrast, the popular edition of
Sūrdās’s poetry, the Nāgarīpracārinī : Sabhā’s Sūrsāgar (Sūrdās 1952) offers
around 5,000 poems. The difference between these numbers point to the
striking contrast between the early Sūrdās tradition, most likely inaugurated
by a historical individual, and the later, where generations of poets have
adopted a ‘Sūrdās mode’ in their poetry and routinely give the poems the
traditional Sūrdās signature (chāp). For Hawley (2015: 274), this means that
we can understand Sūrdās, and similarly influential bhakti poets in whose
names poetry has been written for centuries, such as Kabīr and Mīrābāī, as
¹⁴ The dates of both Gokulnāth and Harirāy are traditional.


‘bhakti movements in themselves’. By building on the devotional and literary
model set up by their inaugurators, the written canons of these traditions, such
as the popular Sūrsāgar, can serve as commentaries or embellishments of the
earliest layers of writing, but also as nexuses of motifs and devotional outlooks
through which devotees, poets, and performers can situate themselves. Tra-
: female flute, muralī, through both the
cing the lineage of the motif of Kr: s: na’s
early and the later Sūrdās traditions, Plau (2015) has, for instance, argued that,
while muralī in the early tradition primarily appears as a woman when seen
through the eyes of the cow-herder girls, the gopīs, the later tradition allows
her to take on a more active persona that can drive discussions on the
prerogatives and imperatives of women as bhakti devotees.
The enduring appeal of the traditional understanding of Sūrdās was
recently demonstrated in the 2012 historical Hindi TV serial Upanis: ad
:
Gangā (Dwivedi 2012). Aiming to highlight the enduring influence of the
Vedas and Upanisads : in Indian culture, the serial presented a broad historical
‘who’s who’ of Hindu mythological and hagiographical traditions. Three full
episodes (E19–E21) focused on Sūrdās, where he again features as a physically
blind man with special religious insight. The twist is that Sūrdās is portrayed
as a Brahmin whose devotional poetry serves to illuminate the Vedas, elegantly
reshaping the potential devotional radicalism of the early Sūrdās tradition to
conform with received tradition—not unlike how the CVV associated him
with the Pus: t:i Mārg. The construction of traditional frameworks for the
pioneers of early modern Hinduism remains a work in progress.
Another figure to consider is the female Vais: nava : sant Mīrābāī. While
relatively little is known about the historical Mīrābāī, the broad popularity of
the hagiographical traditions following in her wake exemplifies how figures of
early modern Hinduism may transcend their original contexts. The broad
outline of the traditional story of Mīrābāī’s life is as follows. In the early
sixteenth century, Mīrābāī is born to the Rathor Rajputs, rulers of the province
of Merta in today’s Rajasthan. When she is married away to the heir to the
throne of Chittor, she refuses to fulfil her marital duties, claiming that her love
is already pledged to the god Kr: s: na.
: Scandalized by this public demonstration
of female defiance, the Chittors attempt to assassinate Mīrābāī with poison and
snakes, all of which are mysteriously turned into auspicious items when
Mīrābāi touches them. Leading the life of a wandering ascetic, Mīrābāī is finally
absorbed into the idol of Kr: s: na
: in Dwarka. Throughout her life, she composes
and performs songs that tell the story of her defiance and her love for Kr: s: na.
:
The subsequent popularity of this story may owe to Mīrābāī’s display of
female defiance in the face of traditional society, and the place of devotion,
bhakti, in that defiance.¹⁵
¹⁵ Hawley (2005) is a central work for the study of the historical Mīrābāī.
32 Adrian Plau
In the modern era, variations on Mīrābāī’s story have appeared across a
variety of popular media, including comic books and several films and TV
serials. In an analysis of a 1979 Bollywood treatment of the story, Pauwels
(2010) shows how the hagiographical framework is subtly updated to reference
modern gender issues, such as when Mīrābāī’s sari catches fire in the ceremony
fulfilling her arranged marriage. In Pauwel’s reading, the incidence hints to-
wards both dowry deaths and the common Bollywood theme of ‘love marriage
versus arranged marriage’, even while staying within the broad framework of
the traditional Mīrābāī story. Following Pauwel’s arguments, the ongoing re-
tellings and variations of that story continue to be evocative objects for studies of
the dynamics of traditional ideas of gender in the interface with the potentially
radical individual imperatives of early modern ideas of devotion.
In terms of longevity and influence, few works of devotional literature from
the early modern period equal the Rāmcaritmānas (‘The Lake of the Deeds of
Rām’) of Tulsīdās, famously described as ‘the Bible of Northern India’ (MacFie
1930). Written in the late sixteenth century in Avadhi, one of several literary
precursors to modern Hindi, the Rāmcaritmānas is a retelling of the
Rāmāyana, : the ancient epic of the story of Rām, an incarnation of Vis: nu, :
and his wife Sītā. Tulsīdās, seemingly a householder knowledgeable in Sanskrit
literature who eventually became a renouncer and moved to Vārānasī, : drew
on a wide variety of influences to add several novel touches to his telling of the
story. A particularly striking innovation, inspired by the late-fifteenth/early
sixteenth-century Sanskrit Adhyātma Rāmāyana, : was to let it be clear from
the outset that Rām really is Vis: nu : incarnate. Lutgendorf (1991) has docu-
mented the continuing popularity of the Rāmcaritmānas in a seminal study of
the diverse performance traditions that have followed it, ranging from story-
telling sessions (kathā) to full-scale theatrical performances (rāmlīlā), and
extending into the modern media of film and TV series.¹⁶ Richman (2001)
comments that the influence of the Rāmcaritmānas throughout North India
has come to surpass that of Vālmīki’s Sanskrit Rāmāyana, : mainly owing to its
vernacular language. Indeed, the script of the wildly popular 1986 Rāmāyana :
TV serial drew on both Tulsīdās’s and Vālmīki’s versions of the story. In that,
we see again the familiar collation of the ancient and the early modern within a
contemporary, popular framework.
CONCLUSIONS
This chapter has surveyed a broad range of concepts, agents, and debates.
Under the keywords bhakti, organization, and language, I explored some of
¹⁶ The first two volumes of Lutgendorf ’s new translation of the Rāmcaritmānas were pub-
lished in 2016, with more to follow (Tulsīdās 2016).
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General Editor: Gavin Flood

The Oxford History

Notes on Contributors vii

Introduction: Modernity and Hinduism 1

PA RT 2. EXPRESSIONS AND LOCATIONS

10. Modern Hindu Diaspora(s) 179

P ART 3. POL I TIC S , ET HIC S , AND LAW

Knut Aukland is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education and

viii Notes on Contributors

Boundaries: Caste, Class and Shifting Faces of ‘Hinduness’ in a North Indian

Media (2018), and ‘Studying Digital Hinduism’, in Sariya Cheruvallil-

The Oxford History of Hinduism

The series offers authoritative, comprehensive coverage of the History of

In historical and social science research the term ‘modernity’ is deﬁned in

Introduction: Modernity and Hinduism 3

THE IN VEN TION OF HINDUISM?

One of the most contentious issues in scholarship about modern Hinduism is

MODERNITY AND STANDARDIZATION

Modernity is a powerful force for standardization in the sphere of culture,

Introduction: Modernity and Hinduism 5

Introduction: Modernity and Hinduism 7

Introduction: Modernity and Hinduism 9

Introduction: Modernity and Hinduism 11

Introduction: Modernity and Hinduism 13

Early Modern Hinduism

Bhakti: Continuities, Innovations, Movements

³ Refer to the bhakti section for a discussion of this key concept.

Early Modern Hinduism 19

Organization: Sampradāy, Rearticulations, Patronage

An almost equally inﬂuential concept to the study of early modern Hinduism

Early Modern Hinduism 21

Early Modern Hinduism 23

Language: Vernaculars, Literatures, Multilingualism

A recurring element in discussions of early modern Hinduism is the role of

Early Modern Hinduism 25

MAIN FIGU RES

Syncretists?: Kabīr, Nānak

As I have already noted in the introduction, the geographical and historical

Early Modern Hinduism 27

Initiators of Sampradāys: Caitanya, Vallabha

I will here look at two initiators of distinct sampradāys, Caitanya (1486–1533)

Early Modern Hinduism 29

Literary and Devotional Figures: Sūrdās, Mīrābāī, Tulsīdās

¹⁴ The dates of both Gokulnāth and Harirāy are traditional.

Early Modern Hinduism 31

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