Asia 295
erly place the legacy of Aurangzeb and the greater mili-
tary colonization of the East India Company.
In such a sweeping survey, there are bound to be
some shortcuts. The concept of “Persianate” itself
remains undertheorized, as is the relationship between
Persian and Marathi, Bangla, Hindavi, and other literary
cultures. Further, there is an ambiguity between Persia-
nate as a literary, cultural, and political concept versus an
ethnic one; how to parse it alongside “Indo-Timurid,”
“Turko-Mongol,” “Afghan,” and other ethnically “nativ-
ist” categories, all of which are used in different registers.
A more robust sketching of the relationship between sa-
cral social and political actors—the sant, the bhakti, the
Sufi, and the yogi—and the making of Persianate India
could have added to our rediscovery of the religious dy-
namism in this hyper eventful period. In some instances,
Eaton uses terms anachronistically, like “immigration”
or “indirect rule” and even “settler colonialism.” That
aside, it is undeniable that Eaton has not only provided a
broad and defining summation of his own extraordi-
narily rich scholarship but also incorporated a wide array
of recent scholarship in his synthesis. The volume comes
at a time when the contemporary politics of history in
the subcontinent rest on a nativist, anti-Muslim claim to
the past. The clear, historically grounded, richly docu-
mented history of belonging detailed by Eaton is a
timely antidote to the separatist ideologies of Hindutva
or Islamism.
MANAN AHMED ASIF
Columbia University
PATTON E. BURCHETT. A Genealogy of Devotion:
Bhakti, Tantra, Yoga, and Sufism in North India. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Pp. xiii, 433.
Cloth $70.00, e-book $69.99.
Recent scholarship on early modern South Asia has fo-
cused on the subcontinent’s pluralistic religious tradi-
tions. Specifically, there has been a renewed interest in
bhakti, broadly defined as diversified Indic devotional
beliefs and practices, and the analogous, and similarly
varied, Islamicate, Sufi traditions. These have emerged
as key areas of study that lend themselves to illuminat-
ing the region’s multiplicity and the dialogue between
Indic and Islamicate practices, which were convention-
ally viewed as being in opposition to one another. Pat-
ton E. Burchett’s A Genealogy of Devotion: Bhakti,
Tantra, Yoga, and Sufism in North India can be placed
within this wider historiographical context. Yet, the
book stands apart from the existing scholarship in fo-
cusing on the crucial role of other, much less explored,
traditions of tantra and yoga in shaping ideas of bhakti
between 1450 and 1750.
While bhakti is recognized widely as a heteroge-
neous religious system, its emergence and popularity
have been viewed as a sudden development, a move-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
ment that arose in insolation from other forms of religi-
osity that may have existed before its rise or even con-
temporaneously. Burchett disrupts the conventional
narrative in two ways. First, he locates bhakti’s rise
within its specific historical context. It is here that he
draws out its links with tantric and yogic religiosity
that were popular in the preceding era. But he also con-
nects bhakti’s rise to the Sufi and Persianate literary
traditions that simultaneously spread with the growth
of Islamic polities in early modern North India from
the thirteenth century onward. Second, Burchett under-
takes detailed close readings of literary works attrib-
uted to prominent devotee-saints to examine the ways
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in which community members perceived bhakti religi-
osity both in interaction with as well as in opposition
to preexisting tantric and yogic practices. The result is
a rich account, divided in three distinct sections, of the
processes—rather than isolated moments—from which
bhakti communities emerged, and an insight into the
ways in which the previously widespread religious sys-
tem of tantra was consequently marginalized.
Śaiva tantra was the dominant form of religiosity be-
tween 600 and 1200. Not only was it popular, it was
also patronized by the political elite and royalty. In
this, tantra often transcended caste boundaries but also,
at once, had an esoteric and folk appeal. But with the
rise of the different Turkic dynasties that made up the
Delhi Sultanate in the thirteenth century, tantra lost its
support among ruling elites. Instead, a transformed so-
ciopolitical landscape brought with it a Persianate liter-
ary culture and the spread of Sufism. These develop-
ments, Burchett argues, paved the way for the emer-
gence of the great bhakti poets of North India.
Along with tantra’s decline, it was the shared pool of
images, narratives, and practices that existed between
Sufis and the bhaktas—religious devotees—that facili-
tated bhakti’s simultaneous rise. New forms of commu-
nication, circulation, and literary genres introduced to
the subcontinent with the sultans’ promotion of a Per-
sianate culture contributed to this development. This
discursive landscape received further impetus when the
Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) forged alliances
with the Rajputs. It was under the Mughals that preex-
isting Indic-Sanskrit and Islamicate-Persianate cultures
interacted in an unprecedented fashion.
After drawing out the conditions for bhakti’s rise in
the first section, Burchett narrows the focus to the
Rāmānandīs of Galta, the most prominent Vaiṣṇava
bhakta community in early modern North India. The
Rāmānandīs’s prestige was enhanced due to the pa-
tronage they received from Akbar’s first and closest
Rajput allies, the Kacchvāhās, and the sect flourished
in the Mughal cultural milieu. Yet, despite the growing
influence of the Islamicate-Persianate traditions under
the Mughals, it was tantric yogic beliefs and practices
against which the Rāmānandis primarily came to de-
MARCH 2021
296 Reviews of Books
fine themselves. The second and third sections care-
fully unpack the different ways in which Rāmānandi
bhaktas engaged with as well as critiqued tantric—and
related yogic and Śākta—philosophies and ritual prac-
tices in their literary output, ultimately always reinforc-
ing the superiority of their own religiosity and devo-
tional practices. A similar relegation of tantrics and
yogis was also evident in the Sufi romances from the
period. And these literary devotional strands, Burchett
shows, worked in tandem—although not necessarily in
consultation with one another—to subordinate the
older tradition.
Literary works—primarily a wide range of remem-
bered bhakti traditions in Brajbhasha, tantric literature,
and Sufi romances—lie at the heart of this study. The
close readings of these rich materials provide a vivid
glimpse into the world of early modern religious com-
munities and a sense of the texts’ texture. They also re-
inforce Burchett’s contention that tantra and yoga
came to be viewed as obscure, heavily ritualistic, and
amoral, not by nineteenth-century British Orientalists
but in fact had already accumulated these association
in the works of early modern devotee-saints. Particu-
larly noteworthy is a chapter in which Burchett delin-
eates a range of ways in which well-known bhaktas
like Kabīr or Raidas caricatured what they perceived
as elaborate yogic ritual practices. In their depictions,
such rituals were always meaningless and fell flat in
the face of the efficacy of the profound love and simple
act of repeating god’s name, which bhakti had to offer
as the path to the divine. A little less emphasis on exist-
ing scholarship, however, would have enhanced the
book’s analysis and made for easier reading.
Burchett’s argument also focuses on the external
factors that led to bhakti’s rise and tantra’s fall in early
modern North India. But some broader questions re-
lated to the internal logic of these religious strands re-
main unexplored. Was there something intrinsic to tan-
tric religiosity that made it particularly unappealing in
the early modern Mughal milieu? Did the absence of
leading figures make tantra less popular in the chang-
ing historical context? What was it about bhakti that
drew the Indic elite of the Mughal era, like the Rajputs,
to bhakti communities?
These questions notwithstanding, Burchett’s ap-
proach of locating the rise of early modern bhakti
within its historical context—as a process and in con-
tinuous dialogue with other forms of Indic and Islami-
cate religious strands—is timely in an era when con-
flict and opposition are rapidly overshadowing South
Asia’s history of religious plurality. A Genealogy of
Devotion makes an important contribution in further-
ing our understanding of a form of religiosity that has
had a deep impact on modern day Hinduism.
APARNA KAPADIA
Williams College
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
KAROLINA HUTKOVÁ. The English East India Com-
pany’s Silk Enterprise in Bengal, 1750–1850: Econ-
omy, Empire and Business. Suffolk, UK: Boydell &
Brewer, 2019. Pp. 275. Cloth $120.00.
The trading and commercial activities of the English
East India Company (EIC) in eighteenth-century Ben-
gal have been the subject of much scholarly enterprise.
From its role as a power broker in the politics of transi-
tion in the wake of Mughal decline, to that of a catalyst
in the production of colonial knowledge about the ori-
ent, the EIC has been understood as a key player in the
transformation of the Bengal and subsequently the In-
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dian economy. While critics of empire have tended to
document and iterate the adverse implications of the
EIC’s monopolist and monopsonist policies, apologists
have reclaimed elements of positive transformation
that the Bengal economy underwent during the various
phases of early colonial rule. The English East India
Company’s Silk Enterprise in Bengal, 1750–1850:
Economy, Empire and Business appears to stand firmly
on the side of the latter and argues that the EIC
emerged as a manufacturer, experimented with signifi-
cant strategies of technology transfer in setting up new
silk filatures (for mechanized silk reeling), and thereby
augmented the productive capacity of silk production
in Bengal, accelerating its exports of silk to Britain for
a brief period between 1770 and 1820. The experi-
ment, however, was short lived but the EIC was not to
blame for this; rather the book argues that it was in the
transition from company mercantilism to the laissez
faire policies of nineteenth-century British Imperialism
that the seeds of disruption and dislocation of the Ben-
gal economy lay.
An obvious critique of such an argument could well
ask whether the rationale behind the technology trans-
fer project equipped Bengal to withstand the later on-
slaught of British free trade and whether the dating of
social and economic dislocation made a major differ-
ence to the story of India’s arrested development. The
author’s focus is strictly limited, looks at the profit ra-
tionale behind the EIC’s silk project, and shows no in-
terest in probing the consequences of its interventions
on the Bengal economy. This is in marked contrast to
the existing work on the subject; Davini in 2009 and
Mukhopadhyay even earlier in 1991 documented the
trajectory of technology transfers in the domain of silk
production in Bengal to reflect more circumspectly on
the impact of early global integrations on Bengal’s
agrarian sector (see Roberto Davini, “Bengali Raw
Silk, the East India Company and the European Global
Market, 1770–1833,” Journal of Global History 4, no.
1 [2009], 57–79; Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay, “The Struc-
ture of Silk Production in Early Colonial Bengal,
1770–1813” [PhD diss., University of Calcutta, 1991]).
The focus of Karolina Hutková’s work is the EIC’s
MARCH 2021