Sightings of Bhakti and Its Social Impact

This chapter shows the regional variations of bhakti traditions and how this diversity complicates theorizing about bhakti. Attempts at providing a general overview take one or another (usually North Indian) regional tradition for granted as representative. In bhakti scholarship, this has over-emphasized aspects of some traditions while suppressing others. The book’s perspective is based in the Marathi-speaking territory of western India (roughly, Maharashtra) where issues of caste and untouchability featured prominently in the region’s traditions. It is no coincidence that Maharashtra was home to some of India’s most organized and vocal movements of Dalit assertion in the 20th century. Chapter 2 thus offers an unconventional overview of bhakti scholarship as perceived from western India, where bhakti’s social contribution in terms of democracy, inclusion, and equality was of special interest.

Bhakti and Equality in Marathi Print, 1854–1950

This chapter charts the establishment of equality language in colonial and postcolonial Marathi publications about Vārkarī literature and traditions and recovers earlier Vārkarī ways of envisioning the relationship between bhakti and caste. Liberal and some nationalist authors between roughly 1854 and 1930 mined sectarian literatures and stories to construct a non-sectarian sense of regional identity. This held special importance because of how vital Marathi literary history has been for imagining the region’s social history. More critical views were voiced by low-caste authors and secular rationalists in the late 19th century, and later by Marxist historians. Food featured prominently in pivotal events in many of these proponents’ and critics’ lives. Having described the formation of modern discourse around bhakti and equality, the chapter starts recovering the earlier devotional and nondualist Marathi terms that modern equality language displaced.

Restaging Transgressive Commensality

This chapter follows the two stories discussed in Chapter 5 into the 20th century, considering how they were represented in plays and films. Three main factors reshaped how the stories appeared on Marathi stage and screen: the narratological demands within and across media formats, equality language that had taken hold in 19th-century Marathi discourse, and the changing landscape of caste politics in the 20th century, especially the rise of non-brahman movements. Playwrights and film producers were inspired by late 19th-century biographers who had become fascinated with the social ethical dimension of stories about Eknāth. In this context, the double vision story’s transgressive commensality became especially popular in plays and films, as producers often sought to resolve the bhakti-caste question by depicting Eknāth as a social reformer.

Memories of Transgressive Commensality

This chapter focuses on two food stories whose retellings changed across various media in the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods. At the center of both stories are the brahman saint Eknāth and Dalits with whom he interacts. In the śrāddha story, Eknāth serves to Dalits a ritual meal that was intended for brahmans, and his unorthodox action is vindicated miraculously in the face of outraged brahmans. In the double vision story, antagonistic brahmans witness Eknāth in two places at once: simultaneously eating at a Dalit couple’s home and sitting in his own home. Chapter 5 traces renditions of these two stories’ movement through Marathi texts between 1700 and 1800. By approaching hagiographical stories with sensitivity to how they change—hagiography in 4D—we find a story about the story. In this Marathi case, part of that meta-story is that hagiographers strategically employed ambiguity to avoid answering the bhakti-caste question conclusively.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the basic problem of bhakti’s relationship to caste—the bhakti-caste question—which is an Indic version of a broader question: can theological egalitarianism lead to social equality? Two key stories about saints and eating demonstrate the complexity of the source materials, which defy simple interpretation. When B. R. Ambedkar framed the question as “Did the saints promote social equality?” he answered emphatically, “No.” The chapter highlights the context in which he made this judgment and the anachronism of using the modern idea of social equality to describe the premodern past. The chapter also lays out the plan of the book and its contributions to scholarship. It concludes by clarifying some key but potentially confusing terms that appear throughout the book.

Bhakti in the Shadow of Ambedkar

This chapter concludes the book by reflecting on the study of bhakti in the shadow of Ambedkar and its effects on historiography and ramifications for contemporary traditions. It argues hagiographers’ strategic ambiguity and the performative nature of bhakti traditions functioning as a resonance chamber led to an ideology of inclusive difference within the Vārkarī tradition. The semantic density of food facilitated this process especially well. In the 19th and 20th centuries, traditional strategic ambiguity and inclusive ideology did not measure up well against the newly articulated standard of social equality. Despite the fact that bhakti saints did not promote social equality per se, whether bhakti traditions and nondualist ethics could embrace it in the future remains an open question. If they can change, then commensality may play a vital role, as it did in the past.

Religion and Social Change

This chapter discusses the peculiarly modern way of relying on the idea of social equality to study the past, which has led to a widespread narrative that religious traditions routinely failed to bring about social equality. It focuses on social historians, whose interest in non-elite people grew out of Marxist sensitivities that predisposed them to view religion as a symptom of distress or instrument of social control but not as a force for social change. It traces the emergence of “equality” as an important term in western political and social writing and how modern nation-state rhetoric from the late 18th century onward made it normative. It becomes clear that modern democracies too have often failed to bring about social equality, even when they explicitly promote it. This develops a penetrating view of scholarship about equality in historical religions, thereby framing the historiographical issues that occupy the rest of the book.

The Complications of Eating Together

This chapter shows why food features so often in Marathi stories to illustrate problems of social cohesion and division: food functions this way in many cultures and time periods. It opens Part II, which examines premodern views as they appear in various renditions of stories about transgressive commensality, following from the three chapters in Part I, which explore the modern formulation of the bhakti-caste question. The chapter highlights interdisciplinary insights from anthropologists and historians about food, especially R. S. Khare’s notion of semantic density. It then surveys food references in various genres of Hindu literature before homing in on meanings of food in bhakti hagiographies—especially ucchiṣṭa, or polluted leftover food.