Table Of ContentENGAGING IN THE WORLD:
SEVĀ IN HINDU BHAKTI TRADITIONS
By
VED RAVI PATEL
A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT
OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
2012
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© 2012 Ved Ravi Patel
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To Anu, Rachu, Bhavu, Milio, Maho, and Sony,
for keeping things light
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank a number of people for the support they have given me.
First, I would like to thank both of my esteemed committee members, Professor
Vasudha Narayanan and Professor Whitney Sanford, for helping me put together a
project that I once feared would never come together. I would also like to thank my
colleagues Jaya Reddy, James “Jimi” Wilson, and Caleb Simmons for constantly giving
me advice in regards to this thesis and otherwise. Finally, I would like to extend my
warmest gratitude to those who took care of me for the last two years while I was away
from my family and home in California.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 4
ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... 7
CHAPTER
1 INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................... 9
Setting the Stage ...................................................................................................... 9
The Question of Terminology .................................................................................. 12
2 HINDU SEVĀ AS ANALYZED BY THE ACADEMY: A TALE OF TWO
DISTINCTIVE EPOCHS ......................................................................................... 16
Making and Breaking Paradigms ............................................................................ 16
Paul Hacker: Setting a Standard ............................................................................. 19
Wilhelm Halbfass: Gently Rocking the Boat ............................................................ 24
Andrew Fort: Rounding out a Millennium ................................................................ 27
Gwilym Beckerlegge: Opening a New Door ............................................................ 29
Andrew Nicholson: Reexamining the Foundation of Hindu Studies ........................ 36
New Approaches .................................................................................................... 42
3 SEVĀ AND SĀDHANĀ: A DELINEATION .............................................................. 47
An Alternate Approach ............................................................................................ 47
Arcana as Sevā ...................................................................................................... 50
Social Service as Sevā ........................................................................................... 54
Sevā in the Ramakrishna Mission ........................................................................... 56
Service to Hindus: The Conception of Sevā in the RSS ......................................... 62
Sevā as a Direct Command of an Avatāra .............................................................. 72
The Idiosyncrasies of the Sevā Binary .................................................................... 78
Sevā as Recitation and Darsan in the Srivaisnava Tradition .................................. 81
Sevā as Internal Service ......................................................................................... 83
A Different Means to Liberation .............................................................................. 84
4 HOME AWAY FROM HOME: HINDU SEVĀ IN ATLANTA, GEORGIA .................. 86
A Practicum Introduced........................................................................................... 86
The Role of Ethnography ........................................................................................ 88
The Hindu Temple of Atlanta .................................................................................. 90
The BAPS Swāminārāyan Mandir .......................................................................... 96
Deep Analysis: Avoiding Superficialities ............................................................... 104
Getting to the Heart: Behind the Public Face ........................................................ 107
Serving Man is Serving God ................................................................................. 108
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Service to God is Service to Man .......................................................................... 113
An Addition to the Sevā Dialectic .......................................................................... 124
5 CONCLUSION: FINAL REFLECTIONS ................................................................ 126
Finishing Thoughts................................................................................................ 126
New Paths ............................................................................................................ 129
LIST OF REFERENCES ............................................................................................. 132
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................... 136
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Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School
of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts
ENGAGING IN THE WORLD:
SEVĀ IN HINDU BHAKTI TRADITIONS
By
Ved Ravi Patel
December 2012
Chair: Vasudha Narayanan
Cochair: Whitney Sanford
Major: Religion
Western scholarship has looked at the concept of sevā in Hinduism for many
years. The focus of these studies has often been on how the concept of sevā has been
expanded, appropriated, and repackaged. On one front, scholarship has looked at the
Neo-Vedanta groups that have seemingly absorbed Western methods of social service
and guised them as indigenous Indian concepts. The second major area of scholarly
interest has been on the Hindu nationalist groups, such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh (RSS), that have utilized the concept of sevā as a means to push forth an anti-
Islamic and xenophobic ideology. In fact, until very recently, little effort had been
allocated to the study of Hindu devotional movements that have both textual and
philosophical underpinnings that advocate sevā and a substantial precedent of
performing sevā.
This thesis argues that the idea of sevā in some Hindu devotional movements is
not a form of appropriation or repackaging of a Western service ideal; it, instead, has an
innate connection with sādhanā, or a means for spiritual progression. Sevā, even when
found in unique forms such as health fairs, blood drives, and education seminars, is felt
by practitioners of certain Hindu devotional groups to be deeply connected to and
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qualified as sādhanā. This research will illuminate the philosophy and historical
precedent that underlie the performance of this sevā by these two Hindu groups. In
doing so, there is a unique and necessary addition to the ongoing dialectic regarding
Hindu sevā.
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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
Setting the Stage
In the 1930s, Paul Hacker began his study of Indology at numerous universities
in Germany. By the end of the 1940s, he began studying Indian philosophy, with a
particular interest in the Advaita tradition. His study of Advaita often engaged in
comparisons by taking Christian theological understandings of concepts such as man
and God as paradigmatic, a standard against which other systems should be
measured.1 Hacker also tended to study philosophical concepts chronologically, noting
the shifts in the meaning of these concepts with the passage of time. Consequentially,
his studies of Advaita in this manner eventually lead him to dividing the tradition into two
parts: traditional Advaita and Neo-Advaita or Neo-Vedanta.
Hacker understood Neo-Advaita to be little more than an adulteration of the
original Advaita concepts and teachings.2 One of these adulterations, Hacker
reasoned, was the inclusion of an ethical dimension that had no basis in traditional
Advaita. Hacker held that this inclusion was a result of Neo-Vedanta leaders being in
contact with western and Christian ideas; the idea of ethics in Neo-Advaita was little
more than an instance of appropriation of foreign concepts. Accordingly, Hacker sharply
criticized Neo-Advaita groups, such as the Ramakrishna Mission, which displayed this
ethical dimension in the form of social service projects. This critique of ethics in Neo-
1 Peter Gaeffke. Book review of Philology and Confrontation: Paul Hacker on Traditional and Modern Vedanta, by
Wilhelm Halbfass, Journal of American Oriental Society, Vol 117, No. 2, 1997, 398-400.
2 Wilhelm Halbfass, Philology and Confrontation: Paul Hacker on Traditional and Modern Vedanta (Albany: SUNY
Press, 1995), 8.
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Vedanta reverberated in western academic religious scholarship for many years, even
after Hacker passed away in 1979.
By looking at the theological, epistemological, ontological, and performative
contexts of two Hindu devotional traditions in the Atlanta area, this thesis will look to add
to the western academic dialectic surrounding Hindu sevā, or service. It will commence
by closely analyzing Hacker’s claims regarding sevā in the Advaita system and laying
out the resulting academic scholarship that followed Hacker’s initial work. Thereafter, a
delineation of the different definitions of sevā, as understood by a number of Hindu
groups, will be provided to show the variety of understandings surrounding the term. It
will emerge that the underpinnings for the sevā that is performed by these groups are
different; even amongst the several of the bhakti-oriented groups there are different
rationalizations for performing sevā. Nonetheless, these underlying foundations show
that there is a deep connection between the sevā activities and Hindu theology. This
remains true even when looking at two Hindu temples in Atlanta, Georgia. The study of
these two temples will show that the connection between sevā and Hindu theology
remains in diasporic communities despite being situated in a context, such as the
United States, with a long-standing precedent of social service performance.
In the first chapter of this thesis, I will provide a literature review tracing this
scholarship dealing with sevā in Hinduism and carrying forth a few of Paul Hacker’s
ideas. This literature will largely reference scholars who addressed Hacker’s stance on
the place of ethics within the Advaita tradition. As there has been little scholarship on
sevā as social service in bhakti movements or other philosophical schools thus far, an
inquiry into the topic begins with the extant literature regarding sevā in the Advaita
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Description:2 HINDU SEVĀ AS ANALYZED BY THE ACADEMY: A TALE OF TWO This critique by Fort hinges entirely on a binary involving the Advaita of
