Poetics and politics of sufism and bhakti in South Asia

This book offers a literary, performative, cultural and linguistic analysis of Sufism and Bhakti in South Asia. Scholarship on this subject is usually limited to either the Sufi or the Bhakti tradition, or to a particular language or region. Poetics and Politics of Sufism and Bhakti in South Asia tries to bridge this gap through a comparative approach on the evolution and cross fertilisation of ideas between Sufism and Bhakti. It focuses on the range of influences across different linguistic and cultural divides. From Kabir’s notion of love and femininity to the articulation of religious identities in Jayasi’s Padmavat, to the trajectories of the concept of viraha in the Nehruvian era, to the performative sentiments of baul and thumri artists, this book coalesces different strands of emotions and spiritualism. Central to this book are the methodological approaches of comparative literary studies, by means of which it attempts to bridge the disciplinary divides of academia and root the literary and philosophical study of Sufi and Bhakti traditions in performance art as well as social processes both within and across cultures. As such the book initiates an interdisciplinary mapping of the cross fertilisation between Sufism and Bhakti through a focus on their creative, intellectual and gendered negotiations, along with histories of strife and structures of desire and aspiration. The volume focuses on common cultural tropes, poetic modes of expression, the languages and conventions of oral and folk traditions, as well as narrating histories that open up the possibilities of sharing concepts and uniting people across differing linguistic and religious cultures. This book highlights the contemporary relevance of Sufism and Bhakti in South Asia. It is an extremely important contribution to the literature on Sufism and Bhakti.