Anand Venkatkrishnan - Böcker

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, 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 caste. They supported, contested, and repurposed the social commentary of bhakti even 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 of bhakti bound 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 the Bhagavata Purana to 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 Scholarship brings to light how the Bhagavata was also studied by Saivas, Saktas, and others on the periphery of the text's history.This is an open access title available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International licence.

In recent years, scholars from a wide range of disciplines have examined the revival in intellectual and literary cultures that took place during India’s ‘early modern’ centuries. This was both a revival as well as a period of intense disputation and critical engagement. It took in the relationship of contemporaries to their own intellectual inheritances, shifts in the meaning and application of particular disciplines, the development of new literary genres and the emergence of new arenas and networks for the conduct of intellectual and religious debate. Exploring the worlds of Sanskrit and vernacular learning and piety in the subcontinent, these essays examine the role of individual scholar intellectuals in this revival, looking particularly at the interplay between intellectual discipline, sectarian links, family history and the personal religious interests of these men. Each essay offers a fine-grained study of an individual. Some are distinguished scholars, poets and religious leaders with subcontinent-wide reputations, others obscure provincial writers whose interest lies precisely in their relative anonymity. A particular focus of interest will be the way in which these men moved across the very different social milieus of early modern India, finding ways to negotiate relationships at courtly centres, temples, sectarian monasteries, the pandit assemblies of the cosmopolitan city of Banaras and lesser religious centres in the regions.This bookw as published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.