Love in the Time of Scholarship: The Bhagavata Purana in Indian Intellectual History

Where is the ＂life＂ in scholarly life? Is it possible to find in academic writing, so often abstracted from the everyday? How might religion bridge that gap? In Love in the Time of Scholarship, author Anand Venkatkrishnan explores these questions within the intellectual history of a popular Hindu scripture, the Bhagavata Purana, spanning the precolonial period of the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries in India. He shows that Brahmin intellectuals writing in Sanskrit were neither impervious to the quotidian religious practices of bhakti, 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, and their personal religious commitments featured in a language and 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, though not in a top-down manner. Rather, vernacular ways of being, believing, and belonging in the world could and did reshape the contours of Sanskrit intellectuality.

Venkatkrishnan revisits the historiography of the Bhagavata Purana 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 associated with the traditions of Vaisnavism, Love in the Time of Scholarship brings to light how the Bhagavata was also studied by Saivas, Saktas, and others on the periphery of the text’s history.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International licence.

Anand Venkatkrishnan is Assistant Professor of the History of Religion in South Asia at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He specializes in the study of Hinduism, Sanskrit literature, and Indian philosophy. His research considers the history of scholarly life in premodern India and in the present, and he is currently working on a social history of American Indology.