Reves Center for International Studies Events
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Reves Center for International Studies
[PAST EVENT] Religion To Make a Nation: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement
March 29, 2012
3:30pm - 5pm
Location
Reves Center for International Studies200 S Boundary St
Williamsburg, VA 23185Map this location
Families have their genealogies and favorite stories; countries have their histories. What history succeeds better for a country than the one capable of molding its citizens into a family?
In India, that has been the particular work of a narrative called the bhakti movement "bhakti andolan" in Hindi. Here bhakti, "the religion of the heart, of song and common participation" is seen as a force of history, something like the contagion of America's Great Awakenings but spanning a millennium. It formed the religious bedrock that would ultimately, in the 20th century, make the nation possible.
Or so we have been taught. This lecture will explore the historical contingencies that actually created this received "and largely Hindu" common sense.
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John Stratton Hawley, "more informally, Jack," is Professor of Religion at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is the author or editor of fifteen books, most recently The Memory of Love (Oxford, 2009), The Life of Hinduism (California, 2006, edited with Vasudha Narayanan), Three Bhakti Voices (Oxford, 2005), Holy Tears (Princeton, 2005, with Kimberley Patton), and a posthumously edited collection of essays by Dennis Hudson, Krishna's Mandala: Bhagavata Religion and Beyond (Oxford, 2009). Jack Hawley has served as director of Columbia's South Asia Institute and has frequently chaired the Religion Department at Barnard College. He has received multiple awards from National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian Institution, and the American Institute of Indian Studies. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow.
In India, that has been the particular work of a narrative called the bhakti movement "bhakti andolan" in Hindi. Here bhakti, "the religion of the heart, of song and common participation" is seen as a force of history, something like the contagion of America's Great Awakenings but spanning a millennium. It formed the religious bedrock that would ultimately, in the 20th century, make the nation possible.
Or so we have been taught. This lecture will explore the historical contingencies that actually created this received "and largely Hindu" common sense.
---------------------------------------
John Stratton Hawley, "more informally, Jack," is Professor of Religion at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is the author or editor of fifteen books, most recently The Memory of Love (Oxford, 2009), The Life of Hinduism (California, 2006, edited with Vasudha Narayanan), Three Bhakti Voices (Oxford, 2005), Holy Tears (Princeton, 2005, with Kimberley Patton), and a posthumously edited collection of essays by Dennis Hudson, Krishna's Mandala: Bhagavata Religion and Beyond (Oxford, 2009). Jack Hawley has served as director of Columbia's South Asia Institute and has frequently chaired the Religion Department at Barnard College. He has received multiple awards from National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian Institution, and the American Institute of Indian Studies. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow.
Contact
Ravi M. Gupta, Professor of Religious Studies, rmgupta@wm.edu