Love in the Time of Scholarship

Abstract Where is the life in scholarly life? Is it possible to find life in academic writing, so otherwise abstracted from everyday life? How might religion bridge that gap? This book explores these questions in the intellectual history of a popular Hindu scripture, the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries. It shows that Brahmin intellectuals writing in Sanskrit were neither impervious to the quotidian religious practices of bhakti, or love for God, nor uninterested in its politics of language and caste. They supported, contested, and repurposed the social commentary of bhakti even in highly technical works of Sanskrit knowledge. Their personal religious commitments featured in a language and a genre of writing that deliberately isolated itself from worldly matters. The religion of bhakti bound together the transregional discourse of Sanskrit learning and the local devotional practices of everyday people, although not in a top-down manner. Instead, vernacular ways of being, believing, and belonging in the world could and did reshape the contours of Sanskrit intellectuality. The book also revisits the historiography of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa to expand our knowledge of the many different religious and philosophical communities that interpreted and laid claim to the themes of the text. While most commonly associated with the traditions of Vaiṣṇavism, the Bhāgavata was also studied by Śaivas, Śāktas, and others on the periphery of the text’s history.