This book examines what can happen when changing political circumstances lead a careful religious thinker to seek authority in a theological tradition that does not align well with his own. The core of the book is a detailed comparative analysis of a Sanskrit treatise by the Gaudiya Vaishnava scholar Baladeva, but it is introduced by a description of the historical situation that led him to write it. Through the seventeenth century, as the Maharajas of Jaipur grew prominent in the Mughal Empire, they increasingly patronized the Gaudiya Vaishnavas, whose image of Govind Deva had come into their custody and, they believed, aided them in their military victories. During the eighteenth century’s first decades, however, as Maharaja Jaisingh II saw the Mughal empire coming apart around him, he attempted to establish his own independent political legitimacy by presenting himself as a protector of orthodox dharma – an attitude that for the Gaudiya Vaishnavas turned out to be a problem. For they – like many other devotional movements of the time – had no clear pedigree in an orthodox Vaishnava lineage, of which tradition proclaimed there were only four (although just which four changed over time). And even though the Gaudiya Vaishnavas had produced some brilliant theologians, none among them had produced a commentary on the Brahma Sutra, normally a foundational text in a tradition claiming to be Vedantic. As various religious groups jostled for royal patronage, Jaipur Brahmins would not let the Maharaja forget the Gaudiyas' less than orthodox position. As the pressures on the Gaudiyas at the Jaipur court mounted, their elders in Vrindavan sent Baladeva, their most talented scholar, to save the situation. Baladeva would justify a Gaudiya claim to a lineage from Madhva – a thirteenth-century figure never questioned as one of the four great orthodox teachers – by revealing apparent similarities between Gaudiya thought and Madhva's in a commentary on the Brahma Sutra that Baladeva wrote himself.

Baladeva’s achievement was all the more impressive because Gaudiya's thought, as it had been definitively articulated by Jiva Goswami in the sixteenth century, was fundamentally different from Madhva’s. The lineage founder’s theology was eminently dualistic, always maintaining a straightforward distinction between the incarnating being and a transcendent divinity. Jiva’s, by contrast, was a more ambivalent theology of wonder: acintya bhedābheda “inconceivable difference in non-difference” – an attitude that is easier to see as a sort of non-dualism than as a clear-cut dualism such as Madhva’s. Like the great twelfth-century Vaishnava theologian Ramanuja before him – who called his philosophy ”modified non-dualism” (viśiṣṭādvaita) – Jiva tried to mediate between an uncompromising dualism and a radical non-dualism of the sort classically articulated by Shankara.

To contextualize a Gaudiya theological perspective Okita first turns to catu ḥślokibhāgavata, four lines from the Bhagavat Purana sometimes taken to be the essence of that scripture – to which the Gaudiyas give very great authority. He looks at Jiva’s commentary on it in relation to others from pronounced dualistic and non-dualistic positions. He then examines Baladeva’s commentary on some crucial early verses of the Brahma Sutra, making comparisons to the commentaries on the same verses by Madhva, Ramanuja and Shankara, while frequently making reference to Jiva – who often supported his extensive teachings on Gaudiya Vaishnavism with orthodox scripture.

Okita shows us how Baladeva maintained a vision consistent with Gaudiya thought while doing what he could to defer to a Madhvite lineage. In doing so, he reveals some of Baladeva’s commentarial strategies. On issues where Madhva’s views converge with Gaudiya thought (as articulated by Jiva), Baladeva concurs, often citing Madhva these instances and elsewhere when he has a chance (p. 153). He may follow Madhva rather than Jiva on an exegetical point, such as the interpretation of a Sanskrit compound (p. 167), even as the philosophical argument to which that interpretation leads ends up closer to Jiva’s than to Madhva’s. Baladeva might also echo Madhva’s rhetoric – presenting extended binaries that illustrate a dualism, as does Madhva, while ultimately wrapping them up in a non-dualistic package (pp. 146–7). These are points that Okita brings out in a learned and sensitive analysis of Sanskrit commentarial traditions that contains extensive translations with footnoted originals. He demonstrates the vitality of those traditions in the eighteenth century and the creativity of Baladeva as a theologian – one who sometimes diverges from both Madhva and Jiva to stake out positions of his own.

Okita’s book offers a wedding of thoughtful old-school textual scholarship with newer, historically oriented early modern studies. The textual scholarship, however, is clearly the partner hosting the feast, providing rich fare that will be enjoyed by those interested in the development of technical Indian philosophy but which most historians will likely find hard fully to digest. These will nevertheless find it worth coming to see what’s going on – sampling some heavy theological courses to understand how they are put together and appreciating the neatly presented early modern hors d’oeuvres.