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

Love in the Time of Scholarshipconcerns the history of scholarly life in precolonial India, revealing the ways that popular religious movements from the wider world infiltrated and shaped scholarship produced in elite traditions of learning. Author Anand Venkatkrishnan shows how specific religious traditions, in their very local, regional incarnations, influenced scholarly work in unexpected ways.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? InLove in the Time of Scholarship, author Anand Venkatkrishnan explores these questions within the intellectual history of a popular Hindu scripture, theBhagavata 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 ofbhakti, nor uninterested in its politics of language and caste. They supported, contested, and repurposed the social commentary ofbhaktieven 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 ofbhaktibound 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 theBhagavata Puranato 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 Scholarshipbrings to light how theBhagavatawas also studied bylÁ