Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Medieval History
Episode: Patton E. Burchett, "A Genealogy of Devotion: Bhakti, Tantra, Yoga, and Sufism in North India" (Columbia UP, 2019)
Description: How distinct is Indian devotionalism from other strands of Indian religiosity? Is devotionalism necessarily at odds with asceticism in the Hindu world? What about the common contrasting of Hindu devotionalism as ‘religion’ with tantra as ‘black magic’? Patton E. Burchett's new book A Genealogy of Devotion: Bhakti, Tantra, Yoga, and Sufism in North India (Columbia University Press, 2019) re-examines what we assume about the rise of devotionalism in North India, tracing its flowering since India’s early medieval “Tantric Age” to present day. It illumines the complex historical factors at play in Sultanate and Mughal India implicating the influence of three pervasive...