ABSTRACT

This volume specifically explores the religious other as a key motif in bhakti (devotional) literatures and practices from across the Indian subcontinent, for the first time bringing together studies from a subcontinent-wide variety of linguistic, geographical, and historical frames. The primary aim of this collection is to reconsider, even challenge, inherited (and often over-simplified) notions of the bhakta’s or devotee’s other as simply Brahmin or Turk, Jain or Muslim, ritualist or logician, Dalit or king, thereby unmasking complex processes of representation that involve adoption, appropriation, and rejection of different sociopolitical and religious agents and communities. Each of the essays to follow considers the nature of religious others who loom large in the works of regional saints and poets, as well as the stance that bhakti authors assume vis-à-vis such others. Taken together, as a whole, they consider the broad discursive strategies employed in the processes of religious othering, attending to transregional patterns of both commonality and distinction and offering new windows into precolonial history in South Asia as they explore the role of alterity in identity formation and contribute to the longstanding question “What is bhakti?”