Hindu Devotionalism as Philosophy: The Integrative Visions of Bhakti (Bloomsbury Introductions to World Philosophies)

The first introduction to use the key Hindu concept of bhakti to explore ideas lying at the centre of Indic ways of philosophical thought and practice. For two millennia, many Hindu religious worldviews have been characterised by the concepts, experiences, and institutions of bhakti, a Sanskrit word that means loving adoration, unwavering devotion, and meditative attention.Working with primary texts (in Sanskrit, Assamese, Bengali, Braj-Bhasha, and Modern Standard Hindi) and translations (from Tamil, Marathi, and Gujarati), Ankur Barua situates forms of bhakti in their sociohistorical contexts.His approach interrogates Eurocentric notions of philosophy and pluralizes our conceptions of how to philosophize in different intellectual contexts. Each chapter features translations from the original texts - including scripts of Bollywood movies - to highlight the diversity of styles of bhakti.Combining philosophical theology, intellectual history, and social theory, chapters delineate the mul