*Article* **The Feminization of Love and the Indwelling of God: Theological Investigations Across Indic Contexts**

#### **Ankur Barua \* and Hina Khalid \***

Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB3 9BS, UK **\*** Correspondence: ab309@cam.ac.uk (A.B.); hk410@cam.ac.uk (H.K.)

Received: 23 July 2020; Accepted: 10 August 2020; Published: 12 August 2020

**Abstract:** Our essay is a thematic exploration of the malleability of idioms, imageries, and affectivities of Hindu *bhakti* across the borderlines of certain Indic worldviews. We highlight the theological motif of the feminine-feminised quest of the seeker (*virahin. ¯ı*) for her divine beloved in some Hindu expressions shaped by the paradigmatic scriptural text *Bhagavata-pur ¯ a¯n. a* and in some Punjabi Sufi articulations of the transcendent God's innermost presence to the pilgrim self. The leitmotif that the divine reality is the "intimate stranger" who cannot be humanly grasped and who is yet already present in the recesses of the *virahin. ¯ı*'s self is expressed with distinctive inflections both in *bhakti*-based Vedanta and in some Indo-Muslim spiritual universes. This study is also an exploration of some of ¯ the common conceptual currencies of devotional subjectivities that cannot be straightforwardly cast into the monolithic moulds of "Hindu" or "Muslim" in pre-modern South Asia. Thus, we highlight the essentially contested nature of the categories of "Hinduism" and "*Indian* Islam" by indicating that they should be regarded as dynamic clusters of constellated concepts whose contours have been often reshaped through concrete socio-historical contestations, borrowings, and adaptations on the fissured lands of al-Hind.

**Keywords:** Bab¯ a Far ¯ ¯ıd; *bhakti*; *Bhagavata ¯* -*pura¯n. a*; Bulleh Shah; Ca ¯ n. d.¯ıdas; H ¯ ¯ır-Ra¯n. jha; Ibn 'Arab ¯ ¯ı; Rabindranath Tagore; Radh ¯ a-K¯ r.s.n. a; Rum¯ ¯ı; Sufism; Vais.n. avism; Vidyapati; ¯ *virahin. ¯ı*; Waris Sh ¯ ah; ¯ Yusuf-Zulaikh ¯ a¯

#### **1. Introduction**

The scholarly literature on Hindu socio-religious systems, produced over the last four decades or so, has directed our attention to the sheer diversity of ways of envisioning and inhabiting the world that have developed within dense networks of Vedic texts, commentarial traditions, and guru-based lineages. With respect to the study of Vedantic exegetical theology, in particular, academic discourses have moved away from monolithic essentializations such as "Hinduism = Advaita"—instead, recent work on Vedanta foregrounds multiple formations of ¯ *bhakti-*shaped Vedantic milieus and also highlights the historical crisscrossings between devotional meditation, ritual practice, and Advaitic self-knowledge (*jñana ¯* ). From this perspective, our essay is a contribution to this developing body of literature on Vedantic theological systems and seeks to explore a relatively understudied feature—the conscious cultivation of a feminine persona by the spiritual aspirant on the pathways of devotional love. From another vantage point, we move into even more unexplored conceptual territory by developing a textually-grounded theological conversation across conceptual, experiential, and affective registers of certain Hindu and Indo-Islamic devotional universes. We begin with a sketch of the key motivations that direct our comparative research before going on to discuss the theological theme of feminine-femininised longing in some lyrical lineaments of Punjabi Sufism (*tas. awwuf*) and north Indian devotional (*bhakti*) milieus. We seek to foreground certain key dialectics that suffuse these poetic streams of Indic religiosity (namely, the dialectics of separation and union, hiddenness and presence, life and death, and joy and sorrow) and that characterize the essence of the spiritual longing as an agonised questing after

an intimate but ever-elusive beloved, much like the subjectivity of a woman racked with pain in separation (*virahin. ¯ı*).

#### **2. The Centrality of Peripheries**

As a result of the Saidian turn in the critical study of religion, it has become increasingly clear that the Indic "East" and the Christian European "West" became densely entangled, across an asymmetrical differential of colonial power, in representing "Hinduism" as one singular formation (Halbfass 1988; King 1999). The social construction of the "Hinduism" that gradually emerged in the Punjab and in Bengal, through various micro-struggles on the ground, was guided by dense intellectual engagements with an array of interlocutors such as Indian Muslims, British colonial administrators, Sanskrit-rooted traditionalists, Anglicised reformists, and others (Inden 1990; Breckenridge and van der Veer 1993). We place Muslims at the top of this list because they constitute, so to speak, the elephant in the room—in the voluminous literature on how some prominent Hindu intellectuals constructed a sense of existential and collective self, across movements such as the Brahmo Samaj (established in 1828) and the Arya Samaj (established in 1875), a significant lacuna is a systematic study of their specifically *intellectual* transactions with Muslim thinkers.

To sketch with broad brush strokes some of these encounters across Bengali social universes, Rammohun Roy (1772–1833) received an education in Arabic and Persian at Patna and became familiar with the Qur'an, Islamic jurisprudence, and theology ( ¯ *kalam¯* ), and also the poetry of Rum¯ ¯ı and H. afi¯ z. (Ghani 2015); Debendranath Tagore (1817–1905) would often quote H. afi¯ z.'s verses (Sastri 1919, p. 148); the extensive prose writings of his son Rabindranath (1861–1941) on the "Hindu-Muslim question" have recently received some analytical discussion (Choudhury 2012); and Girish Chandra Sen (1835–1910), a disciple of the charismatic Keshub Sen (1838–1884), translated the Qur'an into Bengali (in 1881) and ¯ also composed some treatises on Islam (De 1995, p. 24). However, because of various socioeconomic shifts and sociocultural transitions, such as the adverse impact on Muslim peasants of the Permanent Settlement of 1793, the absence of state patronage for madrasas, the abolition in 1837 of Persian as the official language of the courts, the emergence of Hindu groups that began to stridently invoke Vedic templates of the Mother Goddess (*Dev¯ı*; *Bharat M ¯ at¯ a¯*) towards a cultural nationalism, and so on, some Bengali-speaking Muslims in the mofussil became distanced from Anglicised centres in the latter half of the nineteenth century (Ali 1988; Islam 1969; Mannan 1969). Thus, histories of Bengali literature, often constructed by Hindu intellectuals, could consign texts produced by Muslims to a peripheral cultural layer called "Musalmani B ¯ a¯m. la" or claim that they did not have su ¯ fficient literary value (Kaviraj 2003). Moving westward, while the Arya Samaj is often associated with militant attitudes towards Muslims (Thursby 1975), one of its most influential figures, Lala Lajpat Rai (1865–1928), significantly notes in his autobiographical reminiscences that his father studied in a Persian school where the "lofty character" of the Muslim head teacher had "influenced all his pupils and Islamised their outlook". Though he did not formally embrace Islam, at one stage of his life, he recited the *namaz¯* prayers and observed the *ramad. an¯* fast. Rai further informs us that his mother was born to a Sikh family where the people hated Islam, and yet "by an irony of fate [she] was wedded to a man who was a lover of Islam and a friend of Mussalmans, and who renewed every day his threat to turn Muslim" (Nanda 2003, pp. 283–84). Rai, who joined the Arya Samaj in December 1882, concludes this account with these words: "The soul nurtured on Islam in infancy, and beginning adolescence by seeking shelter in the Brahmo Samaj, began to develop a love for the ancient Hindu culture in the company of Guru Datta and Hans Raj" (Nanda 2003, p. 293).

Though Rai's spiritual trajectory—from Islam to ancient India to the Aryas—is somewhat uncommon, it is not entirely idiosyncratic for individuals from his socio-religious milieus, and it highlights two points that are highly significant for our essay. On the one hand, the intellectual formations, the affective structures, and the social subjectivities of many influential figures associated with Hindu modernities were distinctly moulded or modulated by Indo-Islamic traditions. This thin red strand of South Asian cultural history that stretches from the 1820s to the 1940s remains an untold narrative because of its abrupt scission at Partition and its subsequent engineered elision in postcolonial variations of Hindu religious nationalism. Farina Mir (Mir 2006) has argued that an examination of the Punjabi *qissa¯* ("story") literature, which blended Perso-Islamic and local styles, shows that Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims in the late nineteenth century participated in an ethos shaped by the vocabularies and the practices of piety that cut across religiously communalised boundaries. More broadly, in the Perso-Islamic milieus of the late Mughal era, scribes (*munsh¯ıs*) were appointed to teach Persian to children of respectable Muslim as well as Hindu families. Moving deeper into the premodern centuries, a significant body of academic literature has highlighted the circulations of material culture, such as coins, dress, and sculptures, across "Hindu" and "Muslim" milieus from the early eight to the early thirteenth centuries (Flood 2009) and drawn our attention to the writings of particular figures such as Am¯ır Khusrau, who developed highly sympathetic accounts of the socioreligious dimensions of the people of the subcontinent (Gabbay 2010); Dar¯ a Shuk ¯ oh, who tragically tread the borderlines of ¯ heterodoxy by boldly declaring that explanations of the Qur'an are to be found in the ¯ *Upanis. ads* and presenting the reference to a "protected book" (*kitab makn ¯ un¯* ) in the Qur'an (56: 77–80) as a pointer to the ¯ *Upanis. ads* (Friedmann 1975, p. 217); the Rajput prince Savant Singh (1699–1764), who wrote voluminous ¯ poetry in Braj-bha¯s.a with the ¯ *nom de plume* Nagr ¯ ¯ıdas ("devotee of sophisticated R ¯ adh ¯ a") and also wrote ¯ poems in Urdu/Rekhta with sonorous Persian words and distinctive imageries (Pauwels 2012); and so on. From the fourteenth century onwards, the quest for dynamic translational equivalences generated a distinctive genre of Indo-Islamic texts in which Vedantic and yogic categories were hermeneutically re-located on Qur'anic landscapes (Stewart 2001; Khan 2004; Hatley 2007; Dalmia and Faruqui 2014; Ernst 2016; Irani 2018; d'Hubert 2018). Thus, regarding the first Bengali account of the life of the Prophet, the *Nab¯ıvam. sa´* of Saiyad Sultan (c.1615–1646), Ayesha Irani has argued that its textual layers ¯ are constituted by an interweaving of Sufi, Vais.n. ava, and Natha Yoga motifs, so that by moving across ¯ cosmopolitan Perso-Arabic and Sanskrit and vernacular Bengali registers, we can read the *Nab¯ıvam. sa´* as an "Islamic pura¯n. a", a song of praise to the Prophet resembling a Hindu *mangala ˙* -*kavya ¯* or a biography of the Prophet akin to a *carita* of a Hindu figure (Irani 2016, p. 392). The *Nab¯ıvam. sa´* was preceded by the richly symbolic *premakhy ¯ an¯* literature in which some Sufis from Avadh, such as Malik Muhammad Jayas ¯ ¯ı (1477–1542), who composed an Avadhi retelling of the narrative of Kr.s.n. a (*Kanhavat ¯* ) (Pauwels 2013), sought to rework vernacular Hindu-Hindav¯ı idioms into Persian Sufi cosmological systems. While Jayas ¯ ¯ı's near contemporary, M¯ır Abdul Wahid Bilgr ¯ am¯ ¯ı (d.1569), articulated in his *Haqa'iq-i ¯ Hind¯ı* an elaborate array of allegorical readings with Kr.s.n. a as the reality of a human being, the cowherd women (*gop¯ıs*) as angels, the Yamuna and the Ganges as the sea of unity (*wahdat*) and the ocean of gnosis (*ma'rifat*), and the flute of Kr.s.n. a as the production of being out of non-being (Alam 2012, p. 178), around a century later, Hindu poets with Vais.n. ava names such as Sr´ ¯ı Gopal and Brind ¯ avan D ¯ as would ¯ gather around the Sufi poet M¯ırza Abdul Q ¯ adir "B ¯ ¯ıdil" (1642–1720) at Delhi, whom they took as their master (*sheikh*) and on whom they produced a memorial literature that followed Persian canons (Hawley 2015, p. 91).

On the other hand, however, it is precisely these Indo-Islamic and *bhakti*-structured milieus of premodern South Asia that are sometimes romanticised in an ahistorical manner as an idyllic enclave of "Hindu-Muslim" amity. Nationalist historians tended to project these milieus as the panacea for a land scarred by communal conflicts, thereby constructing the "good Muslim versus bad Muslim" binary that continues to shape various socio-political discourses in India. Nuanced historical studies, however, have interrogated these overly modularised re-presentations of, for instance, Dar¯ a ( ¯ Gandhi 2020) as the "good Muslim" and Aurangzeb (Truschke 2017) as the "bad Muslim", and have argued that we should not anachronistically apply our present-day categories such as "liberal", "secular", and "tolerant" to premodern intellectual engagements. Thus, while the stances of Sufis were indeed characterised by modes of cultural synthesis and accommodation, they usually affirmed the finality of Islamic monotheism and at times called for the exclusion of Hindus from administrative offices (Alam 1989). For instance, Abdul Rahman Chisht ¯ ¯ı (d.1695) can strikingly mention the *G¯ıta¯* as a book in which Kr.s.n. a teaches the secrets of Islamic monotheism (*tauh¯ıd*) and in his *Mir'at-al-Makhl ¯ uq¯ at¯* , written

in the narrative style of a Hindu *pura¯n. a*, can also affirm the ultimacy of the message of Muhammad (Alam 2012). Conversely, in the *Caitanya-caritam¯ r.ta*, while some Pathan disciples of the Bengali Hindu saint Caitanya (1486–1534), who were given names such as "Rama D ¯ asa" and "Bijuli Kh ¯ an", are said to ¯ have become renowned as Path ¯ an-Vai ¯ s.n. avas (Prabhupada 1975, Volume 7, pp. 232–34), the socio-ritual alterity of Muslims is clearly marked by the repeated invocation of the pejorative category of *mleccha* ("foreigners outside Vedic orthodoxy").

Therefore, although our inquiry is primarily centred on some Hindu and Indo-Islamic *theological* motifs, it has been necessary to also sketch the *socio-cultural* contours of their locations, since any such inquiry has to be alive to their contested histories and their fraught receptions. The narrative construction of premodern Hindu interactions with Muslim milieus is, as we have seen, caught in a binary trap—*either* one vehemently rends the richly synthetic Indo-Persianate tapestries that once stretched across significant swathes of the subcontinent (Gilmartin and Lawrence 2000; Eaton 2019; Nair 2020), as seen in the writings of V.D. Savarkar (1883–1966) and M.S. Golwalkar (1906–1973), *or* one nostalgically projects a dewy-eyed dreamworld of Hindu-Muslim "brotherhood" (Hawley 2015, pp. 292–93). In this essay, we instead gesture towards a *via media* that would highlight both the *a*ff*ective* vocabularies of devotional love that continue to be translated across Indo-Islamic worlds and the *agonistic* (but not necessarily antagonistic) processes through which these circulations of theological ideas have been mediated.

Such a theoretical pathway would contribute to the ongoing attempts—from the disciplinary perspectives of social anthropology, political theory, and so on (Gottschalk 2000; Assayag 2004)—to decentre monolithic projections of "Hinduism". The claim that medieval Muslims can be placed within either "good" or "bad" categories either covertly presupposes or overtly declares that there is one normative Hinduism out there with respect to which such sweeping evaluative assessments can be readily offered. The methodology that we propose, and begin to develop, in this essay would instead point to the dense conceptual negotiations through which particular Hindu *dharmic* systems have been configured vis-à-vis spatially contiguous forms of Indian Islam, and, conversely, Islamic vernacularized visions (Karim 1959, pp. 165–75; Sharif 1969; Alam 1989; Uddin 2006; Harder 2011; Ricci 2011; Chatterji 1996, p. 17; Eaton 2009, p. 197; Bellamy 2011; Bose 2014; Rahman 2015) have been developed through exchanges—adversarial as well as hospitable—with their environing Hindu linguistic-cultural milieus. When contemporary Deobandi Muslims in Uttar Pradesh characterise their neighbouring Barelvi Muslims as "crypto-Hindus" (Gugler 2015, p. 175), because of particular practices followed by the latter such as the celebration of the death anniversary of saints, the intercession of a saint on the pathway to God, and so on, they might be deeply intrigued to learn that certain Hindu groups—such as the Arya Samaj, monastic Advaitins, and others—would denounce precisely such practices as insufficiently "Hindu". Therefore, given the formation of "Hinduism" in late colonial and postcolonial India through active contestations with some Islamic worlds, the question, "Whose Hinduism? Which Hindus?" turns out to be deeply intertwined with its mirror-inverse query, "Whose Islam? Which Muslims?". From within this dialectical conjuncture, the disciplinary field called "Hindu Studies" can be re-envisioned as "Studies of al-Hind", so that to avoid the two conceptual polarities that we indicated above—*either* a Manichean antagonism *or* an Arcadian accord between "Hindus" and "Muslims"—we would have to undertake a systematic exploration of how Hindu theological motifs that have been developed from distinctively *dharmic* roots have at times been restructured during their socio-historical passages along distinctively Islamic routes.
