Description

In this paper I wish to consider the links between bhakti and the social imaginaries that sustain modern Indian liberal-democratic political thought. I probe the largely overlooked democratic implications of the practices of bhakti and suggest that an analysis of these practices can significantly contribute toward understanding aspects of the culture of Indian democracy. In the paper I also consider how the moral vocabulary of bhakti has influenced dominant articulations of freedom in modern Indian political thought. Through the aforementioned exercise I hope to respond to assessments of liberalism and secularism that consider these doctrines to be tied ineluctably to cultural formations associated with the modern west, and thus unsuited for polities such as India.

Rinku Lamba is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Political Studies in Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, where she teaches political theory. She is interested in modern Indian political thought and contemporary political theory, and is presently working on a book length manuscript on Indian liberalism. Her recent and forthcoming publications combine themes in modern Indian political thought (nationalism, for example) with concerns of contemporary political theory (such as the place of the instrumentalities of the law and state in schemes to accommodate religious and cultural diversity). She has been a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, and an invited Visiting Professor at the Institute for Asian and African Studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Between August and December 2012 she holds the Harold Coward India Research Fellowship at the University of Victoria’s Centre for Studies in Religion and Society.