Introduction:
On 27th September 2025, Al-Mahdi Institute welcomed Dr Ankur Barua from the University of Cambridge to explore a fascinating dimension of South Asian religious history: the intersections between Hindu bhakti (devotional love) and Islamic Sufism (taṣawwuf). In a world often characterised by religious polarisation, understanding how Muslim poets in premodern India sang of Krishna without naming him, and how Hindu devotional idioms resonated with Sufi visions of divine love, offers profound insights into the possibilities of interreligious dialogue. Dr Barua’s research challenges two dominant narratives about Hindu-Muslim relations: the simplistic view of unmitigated hostility and the romanticised vision of undiluted harmony. Instead, he reveals a complex historical landscape where devotional love became a shared idiom across religious communities, while simultaneously acknowledging the socioeconomic inequalities that structured these exchanges.
Key Findings:
The Spectrum of Bhakti: From Majesty to Intimacy
Drawing from the Nārada Bhakti Sūtra, Dr Barua revealed how bhakti encompasses eleven distinct modes of devotional experience. Bhakti, he explained, engages the entire human person: bodies, minds, and hearts. This multidimensional approach ranges from worshipping God as majestic sovereign to loving God as intimate companion, including parental affection toward Krishna as an infant. He illustrated this through the narrative of foster mother Yashoda, who peers into infant Krishna’s mouth and glimpses multiple universes folded into his finitude, only to be mystically made to forget and return to simple maternal love. What makes bhakti particularly compelling is its philosophical sophistication in addressing a theological paradox: How do we speak meaningfully about an infinite God? While one approach multiplies divine names infinitely and another embraces complete silence about the ineffable, bhakti traditions take a third path, using analogy and metaphor to speak of Krishna as the supremely beautiful divine reality whose image “gravitationally pulls the heart away from worldly concerns toward loving devotion.”
The Paradox of Divine Absence and Indo-Islamic Synthesis
A central dimension of Dr Barua’s presentation was his exploration of viraha, the devotion of deepest separation, where God’s seeming absence possesses greater power to purify the devotee than God’s presence. This theology finds powerful expression in the Bhagavata Purana’s narrative of Krishna and the cowherd women (gopis), where Krishna’s world-entrancing flute call draws the gopis away, only for him to disappear suddenly, plunging them into spiritually transformative grief. Dr Barua then traced how Muslim poets in premodern India appropriated these devotional motifs, employing Perso-Arabic terms firāq (separation) and viṣāl (union) as parallels to Sanskrit viraha and milana. Key figures included Dārā Shukōh (1615-1659), the Mughal prince who found resonances between Quranic teachings and Sanskrit Upanishads, and Ras Khān (Sayyid Ibrahim Khān, 1548-1628), who immersed himself in Krishna narratives within a Sufi framework. By the 18th century, Muslim poets were singing of Krishna using symbolic allusions like the “flute player,” with only their signature lines revealing their Muslim identity, creating what Dr Barua calls “sonic theology.”
Beyond Demonisation and Romanticisation
Dr Barua concluded with a crucial methodological intervention for understanding Hindu-Muslim relations across South Asian history. He argued that we must avoid two polarised pitfalls: demonisation, which claims that the non-Hindu other is fundamentally incapable of speaking in local Indic idioms and is doomed to remain a sociocultural outsider, and romanticisation, which represents spaces of translation as enclaves of peace and harmony while ignoring persistent socioeconomic deprivation. A middle way, he suggested, must remain attentive to both the possibilities of relationality and the material realities that have shaped, reinforced, rejected, or recalibrated such connections across five centuries. This balanced approach reveals how Sufi cosmologies of exile from the divine and practices of dhikr (remembrance) were housed within reimagined Krishna-Gopi narratives, demonstrating that “the past is never passed. It is still flowing past us,” continuing through figures like Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), Bangladesh’s national poet, who composed songs about both Prophet Muhammad (s) and the Hindu goddess Devi.
About the Speaker:
Dr Ankur Barua is a Senior Lecturer in Hindu Studies at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge. His research explores patterns of Hindu-Muslim dual religious belonging and the theological dimensions of interreligious friendship across South Asian landscapes. His primary research interests are Vedāntic Hindu philosophical theology and Indo-Islamic styles of sociality, particularly exploring intersections between bhakti, yoga, tawḥīd, and taṣawwuf on postcolonial South Asian terrains. His recent publications include The Hindu Self and Its Muslim Neighbours (2022) and The Brahmo Samaj and Its Vaiṣṇava Milieus (2021). In 2023, he published his debut novel, The Harvest of Time.
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