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 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.
Bringing together studies from a subcontinent-wide variety of linguistic, geographical, and historical frames for the first time, this book will be an important contribution to the literature on bhakti and will be of interest to scholars of South Asian Religions and Asian Religions.
Gil Ben-Herut is Associate Professor of South Asian Religions in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of South Florida, USA.
Jon Keune is Assistant Professor of South Asian Religions in the Department of Religious Studies at Michigan State University, USA.
Anne E. Monius is a Professor of South Asian Religions at Harvard Divinity School, Massachusetts, USA.
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Regional Communities of Devotion in South Asia
Insiders, Outsiders, and Interlopers
Edited by Gil Ben-Herut, Jon Keune, and Anne E. Monius
First published 2020
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ISBN: 978-1-138-49583-8 (hbk)
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We dedicate this book to the memory of Anne Monius, who unexpectedly passed away when it was being printed. Her inspiring spirit and intellectual rigor permeates these pages, as it does in our and so many other scholars lives. Her intellectual leadership, unfailing smile, and readily available advice will be dearly missed.
Contents
GIL BEN-HERUT, JON KEUNE, AND ANNE E. MONIUS
ANNE E. MONIUS
ELAINE CRADDOCK
GIL BEN HERUT
RICH FREEMAN
JON KEUNE
CHRISTIAN LEE NOVETZKE
JEREMY G. MORSE
PHILIP LUTGENDORF
ANAND VENKATKRISHNAN
Gil Ben-Herut is Associate Professor in the Religious Studies Department, University of South Florida. His research interests include premodern religious literature in the Kannada language, South Asian bhakti traditions, and the vernacularization of Sanskrit poetics and courtly poetry. Dr Ben-Heruts book, ivas Saints: The Origins of Devotion in Kannada according to Hariharas Ragaegau, is the first study in English of the earliest aiva hagiographies in the Kannada-speaking region, and it argues for a reconsideration of the nature and development of devotionalism associated today with the Vraaivas. Ben-Herut is currently co-translating selections from this hagiographical collection for a separate publication.
Elaine Craddock is Professor of Religion and affiliated faculty in Feminist Studies at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. Her research interests include the worship of Hindu goddesses, aiva bhakti in Tamil Nadu, and gender and sexuality in religion. Her publications include ivas Demon Devotee: Kraikkl Ammaiyr.
Rich Freeman (Department of History, Duke University) is a cultural anthropologist with a background in classical Indology whose fieldwork, historical, and literary projects focus on Kerala and greater South India. Recent publications include aktism, Polity, and Society in Medieval Malabar in Goddess Traditions in Tantric Hinduism (Routledge, 2015). His work at the intersection of high-caste, literary, and religious history with folk culture, ritual, and spirit possession, converges in a work-in-progress on the development of Hinduism in premodern Kerala.
Jon Keune is Assistant Professor in Religious Studies at Michigan State University. His main research area is Maharashtra, where he considers questions of social history and historiography between 1,500 and the present. He is writing a book that takes a multidisciplinary approach to the tangled question of how