Religious Reading and Everyday Lives in Devotional Hinduism

Few academic monographs begin with as charming an anecdote as Emilia Bachrach’s Religious Reading and Everyday Lives in Devotional Hinduism. In the book’s opening pages, Bachrach recounts a debate she witnessed among a group of Hindu Pushtimarg (“Path of Nourishment”) women about whether it is appropriate to offer Thakurji—a form of the deity Krishna—pizza. The stakes of the debate, the author explains, are not trivial: since devotees “worship Thakurji as a fully animate being,” providing proper care for the deity, ensuring his comfort and wellbeing, is of utmost importance (1). What is more, Bachrach points out that the debate among these women is grounded in and structured by their direct engagement with Vārtā Sāhitya, the hagiographical chronicle literature that tells the stories of Pushtimarg saints. Thus, the story serves as an inroad for introducing the book’s central focus: the transformative individual and communal reading practices employed by members of the devotional Pushtimarg. Over five substantive chapters and a conclusion, Bachrach impressively illustrates not just that reading Vārtā Sāhitya is important to Pushtimarg devotees, but that a plurality of reading strategies sit at the very heart of contemporary Pushtimarg devotional practice.

To demonstrate this, Bachrach focuses each of the book’s five chapters on a different reading strategy that Pushtimarg devotees employ in relation to Vārtā Sāhitya. They are, in order of treatment: dialogical reading, commentarial reading, public reading, community reading, and women’s reading. While space precludes exhaustive examinations of each chapter, I will provide here an overview of one to illustrate Bachrach’s argument that reading sits at the center of Pushtimarg self-fashioning, both individual and communal. Chapter 3 is titled “Public Reading: Debating Text, Temple, and Religious Authority,” and examines how “modes of reading are used to navigate community identity, ritual practice, and visions for the future” (126). Specifically, the chapter investigates ongoing debates among Pushtimarg devotees over the appropriateness of temple worship (havelī sevā) and renovations, financial donation (vittajā sevā) as an acceptable form of service to Krishna, and, at a basic level, how to juggle the tradition of service to Krishna with the demands and expectations of modern devotees. These debates occur in different public domains—online, on social media, and through public readings of Vārtā Sāhitya with accompanying homiletic discourses (pravacan)—and participants come from varied backgrounds, ranging from Facebook commenters to hereditary Goswamis. What grounds these debates, though, and what all participants agree to as the cost of admission to participate in these debates, Bachrach aptly demonstrates, is reading and interpreting Vārtā Sāhitya.

Religious Reading is among the best academic monographs I have read in recent years. Bachrach is correct in pointing out that while the field of religious studies—and, particularly, the study of South Asian religions—abounds in projects focusing on texts themselves, “scholarship that focuses explicitly on reading practices remains somewhat limited” (13, emphasis added). In working to fill this lacuna, what I see as the book’s greatest strength and most important contribution, Bachrach focuses the reader’s attention on how religious people employ strategies of reading to make sense of the world and their place in it. The Pushtimarg devotees with whom Bachrach interacts live frenetic, complicated lives and deploy creative strategies to reconcile the challenges—sometimes, admittedly, mundane challenges—that such lives continually present. Reading, in community or on one’s own, functions as such a strategy, and as such, is always a productive, transformative technology of the self. As Bachrach astutely puts it: “religious reading is embedded in the messy realities of real people’s lives and in the ways in which they make and remake their moral, social, and devotional worlds” (17). What is more, in making this argument, Bachrach is all the while commendably attentive to how issues like caste, class, and, particularly, gender, influence practices of religious reading. Finally, it is important to note that methodologically Bachrach is equally comfortable—and equally insightful—engaging with texts and archival material as she is in conducting ethnographic research. Her skillful and productive blend of methodologies should serve as a model for future scholarship.  

In sum, Religious Reading and Everyday Lives in Devotional Hinduism should find extensive readership among scholars interested in Hindu devotional and narrative literature, the development of modern Hinduism, and practices of religious reading. Bachrach’s clear and engaging prose makes the book accessible to both specialists and non-specialists alike, and I look forward to incorporating the book into my own teaching repertoire.  

Gregory M. Clines is assistant professor of religion at Trinity University.

Gregory Clines

Date Of Review:

August 31, 2023