Q: Hello Professor Venkatkrishnan! Congratulations on the release of Love in the Time of Scholarship: The Bhagavata Purana in Indian Intellectual History. Could you briefly summarize its main argument and contributions to the field of Indian intellectual history?
Thank you for taking the time to speak about my work! The book has two layers of arguments. One is about scholarly life. This argument – more of an invitation, really – is that we can discern everyday life, represented by the quotidian, vernacular practices and motifs of bhakti religion, in the apparently abstract language and genre of Sanskrit scholastic writing. This is a difficult task because there is comparatively little material that allows us Sanskritists to reconstruct the social context for intellectual production. Although my methods in this book are primarily philological, I suggest that our field would benefit from the insights of those fields which work at the limits of the archive, treating the lack of contextual evidence not as a roadblock but as an opportunity.
The other argument is more particular, which is that the Bhāgavata and other bhakti traditions prompt scholars working in unrelated fields of Sanskrit knowledge to reimagine their relationship to them. These fields include the hermeneutical traditions of Mīmāṁsā and Advaita Vēdānta, the philosophical theologies of Śaivism, Śāktism, and Yōga, and alaṁkāraśāstra or Sanskrit aesthetics. Through attention to the local dimensions of these transregional traditions, I demonstrate how bhakti in its textual and extratextual forms was instrumental in reshaping several scholastic domains.
Q: The book discusses the intersection of scholarly life and everyday religion through the lens of the Bhagavata Purana. How does this approach challenge common assumptions about premodern Sanskrit intellectuals?
Much like research professors at the University of Chicago, Sanskrit intellectuals are often considered insular, aloof, and, when not trying to normatively shape it, removed from the social world around them. This impression owes both to the self-professed superiority of Brahmanical knowledge over manual expertise and to the abstract language they employ. I show, instead, that vernacular ways of being, believing, and belonging in the world pushed through the glass ceiling of Sanskrit intellectuality.
Q: What do you see as the broader implications of your work on Love in the Time of Scholarship for the fields of intellectual history, religious studies, or South Asian studies?
In the study of South Asian intellectual history, this book offers an argument about caste in the history of ideas. To assume that Brahmanical traditions are straightforwardly internal conversations between Brahmins, without the involvement of those outside their caste order, takes their pretensions to hegemony and self-sufficiency at face value. Brahmanical thought, like Brahmin community, presents itself as simultaneously exclusive and universal. But in the same way that the political history of caste in premodern India refuses to treat Brahmin ideology as social fact, the intellectual history of Brahmin scholarship should refuse to take its self-sufficiency at face value. As scholars of this archive, we have an obligation to annihilate its caste purity, to insist that it has always been otherwise.
Q: When and how did you first become interested in studying the Bhagavata Purana and its role in Indian intellectual history?
I arrived in graduate school with a knowledge of Sanskrit and some of its philosophical vocabulary. However, I didn’t know much about humanistic approaches to that material. One of my graduate advisors organized an independent study just for me on an early modern Vēdānta text. I found myself asking what kind of work the text was doing in the world rather than what it was saying. From my teachers I learned that there was a tradition of thinking that gave a language to the questions I already had: intellectual history. I wrote a paper in response to this reading about the author’s relationship with his father’s writing, which led me to study the writings of three generations of the family. As it happened, the whole family was obsessed with bhakti and the Bhāgavata, in ways that seemed to clash with their profile as scholarly teachers. The rest of the book built out from this single study.
Q: What was your approach to researching this book? Were there any specific texts or archival materials that proved unexpectedly significant?
The best way to describe my approach is to tug on a thread, see what emerges on the other end, and hope not to end up climbing a telephone pole to unspool it. One text that changed the course of this book was a previously unstudied commentary on the Bhāgavata that was in manuscript form. From it I was able to reconstruct a distinctive scholastic tradition in Kerala that became the subject of my first chapter. However, my study was only preliminary; there is plenty of the text left to work on, and I hope someone does.
Q: What challenges did you face in writing this book, particularly given its focus on such a diverse and multi-faceted text as the Bhagavata Purana?
Fortunately, the book isn’t really about the Bhāgavata but rather its reception. The challenge, of course, is that many people were interested in it in the second millennium. Therefore, I tried to focus on traditions of interpretation that were relatively underrepresented in the historiography. What intellectual history allows you to do is to find out whether the questions scholars have asked are the right ones in the first place. What it lacks is a way to account for non-textual knowledge. Sometimes (okay, often) I find the empiricist imperatives of intellectual history dissatisfying. I played it safe in the book this time around, but not for long.
Q: Are there other texts or traditions within South Asian religious or intellectual history that you’re planning to explore next? What are your future projects?
I am at work on a social history of classical South Asian studies in twentieth-century America. Through intellectual biographies of women scholars, teachers, and artists on the margins of the field, I explore how race, gender, and other forms of ascriptive identity have shaped the ways we work. Although this is not directly a study of South Asian material, it prompts me to rethink the classical texts I learn and teach in the first place. This is an extension of my previous interests in scholarly life, but with a different archive and a different method.
Q: What advice would you give to students or early-career scholars interested in studying intellectual history or the interplay between religion and textual traditions?
Have fun! If we’re not having fun, then what are we even doing, man? Also, be kind to yourself and to other people. The more graciousness you have in your life, the more you have with your subject matter.
Q: How has your membership with COSAS helped you over the course of your career and successes?
In addition to providing the intellectual community necessary for my ideas to develop, COSAS funds have helped me materially by paying for research and editorial assistance.