Hindu devotionalism (Skt. bhakti) centers the relationship between deity and devotee, a deeply personal connection that is understood to offer freedom from worldly concerns and their karmic entanglements. Yet devotionalism also entails particular ways of thinking about and being in the world that have contributed to enduring conceptions of self and society in South Asia and its global diaspora. This panel explores the liberatory promises of devotionalism in relation to worldly life, as expressed through the rich linguistic, regional, and religious diversity of Hindu literary traditions. Focusing especially on southern India, it considers the salience of embodied ethics, placemaking, social change, and labor for Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava devotionalism in the second millennium. Individual papers discuss how specific conceptions of devotion are embedded within, and actively respond to, a range of worldly considerations, including public discourses surrounding caste and subalternity, processes of moral self-fashioning, realist theological commitments, and institution-building initiatives.
"Rāmānuja's Worldliness" explores three senses in which the influential south Indian theologian Rāmānuja (11th century) might be considered a worldly thinker. In the first, “worldly” simply means “believing that the world exists.” In the second sense, “worldliness” amounts to a respect for the ordinary and everyday—for example, appeals to facts that no honest person could deny—as well as a disdain for obscurantism. In the third sense, “worldly” means intervening in the world, wanting to change it somehow rather than simply withdraw from it. Many hagiographies remember Rāmānuja as a social reformer, and regardless of their veracity, they witness a desire to attribute to Rāmānuja yet another way of caring about the world. The paper concludes by reflecting on how (or whether) these three senses of worldliness—philosophical realism, respect for the ordinary, and a commitment to social change—are related to each other.
As with his other works, the century-poem Rakṣā Śatakam (“A Plea for Protection in a Hundred Verses”) by the thirteenth-century Kannada poet Hampeya Harihara did not conform with contemporaneous literary practices in Kannada, both thematically and stylistically. The choice of the śataka style was unusual; the choice of voice and theme unprecedented, with a personal lamenting about the woes of a devotee’s life. While some scholars have read this century-poem autobiographically, I propose to consider this work, rather, as a public appeal for constructing a new and composite self for the community of Śiva-devotees in the Kannada-speaking region. This self is a full participant in householder life, but one who finds solace only in ritual worship of the god. In this way, the Rakṣā Śatakam carves an ethical prescription for a worldly life that is, despite its worldliness, centered on devotional self-surrender.
The Vairākkiya Catakam (“One Hundred [Verses] on Dispassion”) is a seventeenth-century Tamil poem composed in the vicinity of Pērūr, in what is now western Tamil Nadu, that encourages devotion to Śiva. Significantly, it is divided into a “treatise” enjoining the mind to abandon its worldly attachments, and a “hymn” appealing directly to Śiva for liberation. This formal innovation appears designed to reform a group of “worldly people” (Tm. ulakar) by instructing them in the aspirations and sensibilities of a Śaiva devotee. Enhancing this project is the poet’s repeated mentions of his personal experiences of Śiva, which likely allude to the contemporaneous construction of a golden hall in the Pērūr temple by the Madurai Nāyakas. Ultimately, I suggest that the poem’s effort to replace its audience’s worldliness with devotion is inextricable from wider political and religious processes that drew the previously marginal Tamil hinterlands into an expansive early modern Śaiva ecumene.
Kōpālakiruṣṇa Pārati’s (Bharati; 1811-1896) composition Nantaṉār Carittirakkīrttaṉaikaḷ (1861) catalyzed the bhakta Nantaṉār’s popularity across Tamil country. Bharati reimagined the stigmatized saint’s story of union with Śiva as musical drama and agrarian struggle. In the narrative, Nantaṉār, the laboring aṭimai (slave), struggles to convince both his Brahmin master, Vētiyar, and Dalit caste kin of his desire to see Śiva. In this talk, I explore Bharati’s discourse on the body at three levels: (1) theological, grounded in popular and doctrinal Śaivism, (2) devotional, through embodied action, and (3) labor, the system of bonded labor and modes of punishment and supplication. Taken together, I argue that while Bharati, like many authors of bhakti literature, brings to the fore the inherent tensions of the exceptional individual’s devotional journey against societal structures and expectations, he explores the way caste and untouchability permeate the so-called worldly and other-worldly divide.
| Karen Pechilis | kpechili@drew.edu | View |