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Description of  Regional Communities of Devotion in South Asia: Insiders, Outsiders, and Interlopers (Routledge South Asian Religion Series)

This book explores the key motif of the religious other in devotional (bhakti) literatures and practices from across the Indian subcontinent unmasks processes of representation that involve adoption, appropriation, and rejection of different social and religious agents. The book reconsiders and challenges inherited notions of the bhaktas or devotees other. Considering the ways in which bhakti might be conceived as having an inter-regional impactas a force, discourse, network, mythology, ethicthe book critically engages with extant scholarly narratives about what bhakti is and traces when and how those narratives have been used. The sheer diversity of South Asias devotional traditions renders them an especially rich resource for examining social and religious fault lines, thereby furthering scholarly understanding of how communalism and sectarianism originate and develop on local or regional levels, with wider geographic implications. Read more