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| Student Biography |
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Patton Burchett |
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Biography
Patton Burchett is a PhD candidate in South Asian religious history and culture. His work focuses primarily on traditions of Hindu bhakti and tantra in north India during the early modern period (c. 1500-1750). Patton also studies theoretical and topical issues related to the category of “magic” (and its relation to “religion,” “science,” etc.) and holds strong research interests in the field of international human rights, particularly in the Dalit movement in contemporary India. His secondary interests extend to the history of Sufi Islam in South Asia and the development of Buddhism in South and East Asia.
Patton’s dissertation project examines the vital roles played by three major groups in the rise of bhakti (devotional) religion in early modern north India: the Kacchwaha royal lineage of eastern Rajasthan, the Ramanandi sect, and the tantric ascetics/magicians known as the Nath Siddhas. Through archival and ethnographic research on these groups, the project investigates (a) the influence of Rajput courts on bhakti's institutional and literary development in the context of their interaction with Mughal imperial power and literary culture, (b) the relationship between the simultaneous growth of sedentary, literature-producing, devotional communities and militarized itinerant ascetics, (c) the interaction, confrontation, and mutual influence of bhakti and Tantra, and (d) the pre-colonial rise in north India of certain notions of 'religion' and 'magic.' The project centers on developments involving the Kacchawaha ruling family of Amber/Jaipur and the Ramanandi monastic communities of Galta and Raivasa (as well as the important Vaishnava communities in Braj/Brindavan), but it also aims to explore the ways in which the categories of bhakti and tantra, religion and magic, were appropriated and translated to serve the varying agendas of European Orientalist scholars, British colonial officials, and Indian nationalists.
Patton has co-coordinated two graduate conferences, the Columbia University Religion Department’s “Belief Matters: Re-conceptualizing Belief and its Use” in April 2009, and the Indiana University Religious Studies Department’s “Embodying Volatile Borderlands: Religion, Gender, and Sex(uality)” in April 2006.
Patton has published the following essays: --“The ‘Magical’ Language of Mantra,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76:4 (2008) --“Bhakti Rhetoric in the Hagiography of ‘Untouchable’ Saints: Discerning Bhakti’s Ambivalence on Caste and Brahminhood,” International Journal of Hindu Studies 13:2 (2009) --“My Miracle Trumps Your Magic: Confrontations with Yogis in Sufi and Bhakti Hagiographical Literature,” in Yoga Powers, edited by Knut Jacobsen, forthcoming from Brill in Fall 2010.
Patton was awarded his Master of Philosophy by Columbia University in October 2009. Prior to coming to New York, he earned a Master of Arts (2006) from Indiana University-Bloomington, writing a MA Thesis entitled “The Aesthetics of Tantric Identity-Transformation: Sex, Language and Art in Kashmiri Shaiva Religious Practices.” His Bachelor of Arts (2000) comes from Davidson College (NC), where he wrote an Honors Thesis entitled “The Historical and Intellectual Origins of the Ch’an Tradition: A Study in the Acculturation of Buddhism in China.”
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