From foolish ascetics to enemies of Siva : the fate of Jains as religious others in Tamil Saiva literature / Anne Monius -- Kali dances into the cremation grounds of the Tamil land / Elaine Craddock -- Arguing with Vaiṣṇavas, annihilating Jains : two religious others in early Kannada Śivabhakti hagiographies / Gil Ben-Herut -- Bhakti Inc., Kerala : alienated selves and assimilated others / Rich Freeman -- The challenge of the swappable other: a framework for interpreting otherness in bhakti texts / Jon Keune -- The political field of bhakti at the emergence of Marathi literature in premodern India / Christian Lee Novetzke -- The Datta saṃprādaya and its "others" / Jeremy G. Morse -- Lost in the lake : and his others / Philip Lutgendorf -- Are there atheists in potholes? Mīmāṃsakas debate the path of bhakti / Anand Venkatkrishnan.
Summary:
"This book explores the key motif of the religious Other in devotional (bhakti) literatures and practices from across the Indian subcontinent. The primary aim of this book is to reconsider and challenge inherited notions of the bhakta's or devotee's Other and unmask processes of representation that involve adoption, appropriation, and rejection of different social and religious agents. The book considers the ways in which bhakti might be conceived as having an inter-regional impact--as a force, discourse, network, mythology, ethic--while critically engaging with extant scholarly narratives about what bhakti is and tracing 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. 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 it will be of interest to scholars of South Asian Religion and Asian Religion"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.