Edited Volume

Regional Communities of Devotion in South Asia

This book explores the key motif of the religious Other in devotional (bhakti) literatures and practices from across the Indian subcontinent and unmasks processes of representation that involve adoption, appropriation, and rejection of different social and religious agents.

The collected essays in this volume reconsider and challenge inherited notions of the bhakta’s or devotee’s Other. Considering the ways in which bhakti might be conceived as having an inter-regional impact—as a force, discourse, network, mythology, and ethic—this 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 Asia’s 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.  We talk about this book in a podcast interview in the New Books on Indian Religions series.

Regional Communities of Devotion in South Asia developed out of the 2015 RBSN symposium “Bhakti Traditions: Who’s In, Who’s Out?”

Journal Volume

Bhakti across Boundaries

The Journal of Hindu Studies, Volume 8 Issue 3

Linguistic Anxiety and Geographical Aspiration in the Tamil Śaiva Literary World

Anne E. Monius

Figuring the South-Indian Śivabhakta Movement: The Broad Narrative Gaze of Early Kannada Hagiographic Literature

Gil Ben-Herut

Emphatically Ignoring the Neighbours: the Selective Geographic Orientation of Marathi Bhakti

Jon Keune

Bhakti Across Boundaries: A Response

John Stratton Hawley

This issue grew out of the October 2014 RBSN symposium, “On the Idea of the Bhakti Movement.”