The study of bhakti has been undergoing a resurgence lately. Extending well beyond traditional readings of poetry and hagiography, bhakti studies has become a node for cross-disciplinary research informed by timely concerns and theoretical sophistication. As it ranges across genres of historical inquiry—cultural, religious, literary, social, and intellectual—as well as the visual arts, anthropology, politics, gender, media studies, and other fields, bhakti allows for many views of South Asia, especially representations of nonelite and marginalized people who otherwise rarely appear in sources before the nineteenth century. Now central to the field is accounting for the political forces of patronage and suppression that shaped the traditions we encounter today, as well as many of our conventional categories for thinking about bhakti at all. The two books under review here demonstrate this critical, multivalent scholarship exceedingly well and push the envelope further.

Patton E. Burchett's A Genealogy of Devotion: Bhakti, Tantra, Yoga, and Sufism in North India skillfully reveals the stages by which bhakti came to be viewed as a discreet religious stream. Especially in North India, bhakti proponents increasingly distinguished themselves from tantra and yoga practitioners in the sixteenth century—a sectarian typology that has become standard among both adherents and scholars. As Burchett notes, the argument about historically comingled bhakti and tantra has been made before, including in several chapters of Tantra in Practice, edited by David Gordon White.Footnote ¹ But no one has demonstrated this as exhaustively and by drawing on conventional bhakti sources as Burchett, who also points out that the division between bhakti and tantra began long before Orientalists with their Protestant lenses arrived on the scene. The threads of bhakti and tantra that had been intertwined before 1600 were pulled further and further apart, mainly at the hands of Vaiṣṇava sectarians but spurred on by Mughal and Rajput rulers. Consequently, this Vaiṣṇava bhakti discourse bore a resemblance to Persianate and Sufi idioms that was too uncanny to be a coincidence. The book cover's image of rough-woven strings—sometimes intertwined, sometimes separate and crossing, and often frayed—could not be more apt.

A Genealogy of Devotion is a weighty tome that easily could have been multiple books. Burchett divides the work into three parts. Part one surveys the religious landscape of North India between the seventh and seventeenth centuries, highlighting the prominence of tantric traditions before the fourteenth century, the gradual spread of Persianate cosmopolitanism and Sufism, and the eventual shift in patronage away from tantric Śaiva and Śākta groups to Vaiṣṇavas in the sixteenth century. For scholars of bhakti, the lengthy first chapter tracing tantra's immense influence in medieval South Asia will be especially illuminating; this is not standard bhakti studies fare, and it is a welcome corrective.

Part two zooms in on important figures within the Rāmānandī sampradāy at Gāltā (a surprisingly syncretic crew, as it turns out), their yoga-practicing Nāth contemporaries, and sixteenth-century rulers. This makes up the core of Burchett's textual and historical argument. Among the Rāmānandīs, the community's founder, Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī, and his two disciples Kīlhadev and Agradās were involved in ascetic tantric practices while nonetheless emphatically distinguishing themselves from contemporary tantric yogis and their professions of supernormal powers. The works of Agradās especially reveal how the Rāmānandīs positioned themselves within the Mughal public sphere with a strategically inclusive message that won them support from generous elites, including Kacchvāha-Rajput rulers and, through them, Akbar and some of his nobles. This new patronage landscape inflected the Rāmānandīs’ bhakti discourse, which, in turn, radiated out to other Vaiṣṇava groups across northern and western India.

Part three of the book steps back again, to focus on the ways in which hagiographers around northern and western India came to narrate bhakta-tāntrika encounters in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Burchett highlights the ways in which bhaktas and Sufi premākhyān literature drew on similar strategies, themes, and emotions as they distinguished themselves from tantric and yogic ascetics. In effect, they developed a premodern dichotomy that maps roughly onto what we now think of as devotion versus magic, well before European Orientalists and their Protestant presuppositions arrived on the subcontinent.

This book makes many contributions to the field. Burchett discusses the pivotal figure of Agradās in new ways, highlighting his entrepreneurial spirit and drawing on hitherto overlooked manuscripts to do so. As he underscores the intervention of Agradās and others, Burchett also calls attention to the composite natures of vernacular bhakti in North India. This revises popular understandings of bhakti now, including by reckoning more seriously with references to tantra and yoga that appear in classic bhakti texts such as the Bhāgavata Purāṇa.

Contrasting with Burchett's solo effort and monograph with a single narrative, Bhakti and Power: Debating India's Religion of the Heart, edited by John Stratton Hawley, Christian Lee Novetzke, and Swapna Sharma, presents a splendid array of scholarship that converged in a conference at Yale University in 2016. This edited format keeps with a long-running trend—a great deal of new and specialized scholarship on bhakti appears in edited books and special issues of journals. The essays in Bhakti and Power stand out both for their unusually large number (eighteen, including the introduction) and their concision (averaging twelve pages each), all produced by an array of leading and rising scholars. As the editors refrain from standardizing the many transliteration schemes of the languages that appear throughout the book, they wisely resist imposing a rigid structure on the contributions, grouping them instead under the headings “Situations,” “Mediations,” and “Solidarities.” This gives the reader a kaleidoscopic vision of power as it has been inflicted, resisted, managed, redirected, and experienced across South Asia.

Both bhakti and power take many forms and move in many ways here, not only in Hindu locales but also in Jain, Sufi, Dalit, and even national secular contexts. If any single essay comes closest to encapsulating this diversity, Hawley's “Bhakti the Mediator” may be it. All of the volume's essays are strong and worth noting, but their sheer number rules out the possibility of summarizing each in this short review. For the sake of space, I mention two themes that stood out to me across the essays; readers with different sensibilities will surely spot others.

Not surprisingly, bhakti traditions’ relationship to caste and the question of equality frames several of the essays. Gil Ben-Herut and Heidi R. M. Pauwels explore complex cases in Kannada and Hindi hagiography to reveal traditions’ emic strategies for managing difference and transgression in ways that modern social analytical concepts can only approximate. Joel Lee and Divya Cherian show how bhakti themes were consciously deployed to envelope and regulate Dalit communities and their practices in eighteenth- and twentieth-century North India. Liberation may play a role in bhakti, but not everywhere and not always.

The affective dimension of bhakti is considered in many essays, some more explicitly than others. Karen Pechilis, Barbara Holdrege, and others had already begun turning our attention toward embodiment in bhakti traditions. Essays by Pechilis, Lee, Eben Graves, and Shrivatsa Goswami demonstrate the great potential of these approaches for observing widely different cases, from textual interpretation, to performance, to social organizing. After all, whatever influence politics had, bhakti traditions would not have attained such popularity without the affective power to engage and move followers. This will be a promising avenue for further research on topics as diverse as bhajan singing, story reenactment, and commensality.

Bhakti and Power concludes with Richard H. Davis's reflection on three decades of teaching bhakti courses in American classrooms. As instructors will appreciate Davis's lessons taught and learned, they may also detect a tacit implication of this book's pedagogical value. The diversity and compactness of the book's essays make them easy to integrate into advanced undergraduate or graduate course syllabi. The ostensive subject here is bhakti, but the book introduces readers to an array of regions and languages, 1,400 years of history, and multiple religious traditions, with ample translated passages and grayscale illustrations along the way.

Combining the depth of Burchett's work with the breadth of Bhakti and Power, one wonders what a middle path of scholarship may look like, pursuing well-defined research questions on a pan-Indian scale collaboratively. How did the bhakti-tantra relationship play out in other regions, with their own political formations, competing traditions, and sectarian institutions? Burchett notes that “vernacular Nāths” in western India differed from the more organized group whom Rāmānandīs found useful to otherize. Likewise, what did this look like in Kerala and Assam, where tantra was more institutionally supported for longer periods while fewer communities coalesced around bhakti? If the Mughal environment left a Sufi inflection on North Indian Vaiṣṇavism, what happened in the heterogenous Deccan sultanates? Such cross-regional vectors would shed new light on bhakti-tantra and bhakti-Islam relationships across the subcontinent and thereby bring into focus, perhaps, the peculiar regionality of popular tropes. This may involve designing collaborative mechanisms that prompt diverse specialists to turn their collective attention in a common direction.

The myriad approaches and foci within these books defies a single overview. Yet, even without an overarching narrative, some patterns do appear, such as the question of equality mentioned earlier. Also, whereas textual analysis and positivist attempts to reconstruct the past dominated bhakti studies even thirty years ago (and continuing, with more theoretical rigor), greater interest now has turned to historiography and memory. This, of course, is vital for understanding how the past was conceived and passed on, and it points out ways in which we might understand even basic concepts anew. But might this approach have become too dominant in bhakti studies today? (I pose this question ruefully, viewing myself as squarely within the historiography camp.) Ethnography of bhakti nowadays is rare, and maybe for good reason, in the current political environment. Regardless, we could surely benefit from greater methodological diversity.

If an overview of the field is unfeasible, perhaps one concluding observation may be made. Near the start of this century, two important critiques of bhakti studies appeared: one by Sheldon Pollock on bhakti's outsized role in vernacularization, and another by David Gordon White on bhakti's overshadowing of tantra in Indian history.Footnote ² In Novetzke's Quotidian Revolution Footnote ³ and in many of the essays in this edited volume, we have clearly arrived at much more nuanced views about vernacularization. Burchett has offered an evenhanded, appreciative, yet also sometimes rebuffing response to White. At the risk of overgeneralizing, if the pendulum was swinging toward more critical views of the state of bhakti studies, the two books under review and many others suggest that its trajectory now is headed upward. At the least, these two volumes and their many contributors demonstrate the continued power of bhakti studies for understanding forces that have shaped people's lives across South Asia in the past and continue to do so.