John Stratton Hawley, "A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement" (Harvard UP, 2015)

New Books in Indian Religions · Dec 20, 2022 · 48m

India celebrates itself as a nation of unity in diversity, but where does that sense of unity come from? One important source is a widely-accepted narrative called the “bhakti movement.” Bhakti is the religion of the heart, of song, of common participation, of inner peace, of anguished protest. The idea known as the bhakti movement asserts that between 600 and 1600 CE, poet-saints sang bhakti from India’s southernmost tip to its northern Himalayan heights, laying the religious bedrock upon which the modern state of India would be built.

In A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti…