If historical narratives are formed under the constraints of national identity formation, then A Storm of Songs shows us how bhakti has been one such narrative. John Stratton Hawley shows how what became known as the bhakti movement was formulated in the twentieth century, very much in relation to the emerging nation of India. But Hawley's is no simple historicism, reduction of historical depth to political expediency, or purely cultural constructivism. Beginning with Tagore's description of the poetic output of Ravidās as “a storm of songs,” Hawley shows how this emotional devotion to a deity became part of Tagore's understanding of India's “religious whole.” But just what is this devotion in the history of the nation? What is bhakti? asks Hawley. He then proceeds to take the reader on a journey through a history of texts about the idea of bhakti and the formation of the bhakti movement as a national theme. This is not an inquiry into the origins of bhakti, but rather into how the idea of the bhakti movement came about.

Bhakti, Hawley reminds us, is devotion, “heart religion, sometimes cool and quiescent but sometimes hot” (p. 2), that has been articulated by poets from across the subcontinent and in all of India's major languages from Tamil (such as Nammāḻvār), to Marathi (such as Nāmdev) and Hindi (such as Kabīr). The origins of this devotionalism are in the Tamil poets in the sixth century that spread to Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Gujarat and then to the Hindi- and Urdu-speaking regions in the north by the seventeenth century. V. Raghavan's Patel Memorial Lectures in 1964 described India's poet-saints as consolidation upon which the “territorial integration of India had relied and would continue to rely” (p. 20). For Raghavan, bhakti is a democratic impulse that unites people of all communities and genders and so lays the foundation for the modern nation. In contrast, more recent voices have disparaged the idea of a single bhakti narrative. Krishna Sharma was the first scholar to critically examine it, and Sheldon Pollock has argued that the use of Indian vernaculars was in the political and aesthetic settings of the court rather than the context of bhakti.

Hawley claims that the idea of the bhakti movement was formulated in the twentieth century and that the rhetoric that the movement began in the south and moved to the north is a formulation found only in northern sources. The picture is much more complex. Thus, for example, Karnataka is a pivotal location for the development of bhakti, and here are found traditions going south as well as north with the Vijayanagara kings (p. 86). Rather than a single movement, a number of regional developments have a complex historical relationship. According to this view, one cannot identify a single bhakti movement but rather there are “more independently constituted bhakti clusters” (p. 327).

The story of bhakti making a transit from south to north is expressed in the personification of bhakti as a young woman, found in the Bhāgavata Māhātmya, a text that extols the virtues of the classic bhakti text the Bhāgavata Purā ṇa, composed by northern Brahmins sometime between the mid-seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Here bhakti becomes “lovely once again” in new locations, especially in Brindaban, the locus of Krishna devotion, that reflects the historical reality of “the major program of land grants and temple construction by which bhakti was deliberately built for all to see” (p. 75). Indeed, it was the Mughal state itself that made possible the development of Brindaban in the sixteenth century. The spirit of this analysis is carried on in the next three chapters dealing with the four famous traditions, the sampradāyas. Nābhādās, who was one of the first to formulate the idea, lived in a community that would later be called the Rāmānandīs, who were patronized by the Kachvaha kings. When Aurangzeb died, the Kachvaha king Rāja Jaysiṅgh II (1699–1743) envisioned a new imperium and gave state sponsorship to the idea of bhakti as exclusively Vaiṣṇava (p. 196). Twentieth-century Indian intellectuals, particularly Tagore and his circle at Shantiniketan, inherited this formulation of the bhakti tradition. In contemporary times, bhakti has become a political narrative that can be used to construct India in a way that excludes Muslims and Dalits.

Hawley's intervention shows that one cannot simply trust the view of the unproblematic movement of bhakti from southern Tamil sources to the north. It argues that the history of the bhakti movement cannot be separated from the history of political institutions and royal patronage. There is no pure history of ideas here, but rather a turn to “real world” historical realities within which ideas and practices were formed. This is an important perspective that is convincing but not without caveat. I point this out because one can read Hawley's book as making a causal claim about historical, political processes giving rise to ideas and practices that reinforce those processes. But with religious ideologies and practices, such as the storm of songs, one needs to be cautious in the specification of constraints that have—to use Bowker's terminology—controlled an event into its outcome. Political process, especially in the context of the Kachvaha kings, is an extremely important constraint upon the formation of the bhakti narrative and whom it excludes, as Hawley shows. But one is still left with philosophical and theological questions about human experience and the enthusiasm, or what one might call bhakti subjectivity, that the songs themselves express. This aside, A Storm of Songs lays to rest any unproblematic, straightforward historical narrative of the bhakti movement. Hawley's book has rethought bhakti from a historical perspective in a deeply engaging way; anyone with an interest in Hinduism and contemporary India should read this important book.