Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Indian Religions
Episode: Anand Venkatkrishnan, "Love in the Time of Scholarship: The Bhagavata Purana in Indian Intellectual History" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Description: 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: The Bhagavata Purana in Indian Intellectual History (Oxford UP, 2024), 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 cast...