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3 - Devotion and Dissent in Hunter's Bhakti

from Introduction: Locating Devotion in Dissent and Dissent in Devotion A Thematic Overview

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2014

T. S. Satyanath
Affiliation:
University of Delhi
Vijaya Ramaswamy
Affiliation:
Professor, Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University
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Summary

Introduction

Did the spider study the Vedas?

or the snake consult law books?

Did the elephant labour at spiritual disciplines?

or the hunter intone a mantra?

Can learning be the source,

of our awakening?

No! To worship your feet

with devotion,

O god of Kāḷahasti,

would be enough for everything,

that lives!

This poem, from Dhurjati's Śrīkālahastīśvara-śatakamu, a seventeenth century Telugu text, rightly creates an interesting intertextuality between bhakti poems, hagiographies and the sthalapurāņa of Kalahasti and Kannappa. The reference to the animals associated in the sthalapurāņa and to the hunter, Bhakta Kannappa, in a single verse, not only establishes an intertextuality between the sthalapurāņa and hagiographic traditions but also creates an equation between the bhakti of the hunters, animals and animal-like bhaktas. The first four lines of the verse question the futility of orthodox learning as the spider, snake, elephant and the hunter bhakta did not have any such knowledge. Subsequently, it states in a declarative tone that the learning need not have to be the source of awakening. Then, while negating all such orthodox approaches to the realization of God, the poem upholds the belief that devotion, even performed sacrilegiously, could liberate everything that lives on the earth. The poem epigrammatically captures the discussion and analysis that has been done in this essay within an ambivalent trend of a subservient devotion and subversive revolt in operation simultaneously that has been variously conceived as counter-structure, dissent and non-āgamic, pratilōma.

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Publisher: Foundation Books
Print publication year: 2014

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