Jon Keune

(PDF = book cover only.)  Abstract:
This book is about a deceptively simple question: when Hindu devotional or bhakti traditions welcomed marginalized people—women, low castes, and Dalits—were they promoting social equality? This is the modern formulation of the bhakti-caste question. It is what Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar had in mind when he concluded that the saints promoted spiritual equality but did not transform society. While taking Ambedkar’s judgment seriously, when viewed in the context of intellectual history and social practice, the bhakti-caste question is more complex. This book dives deeply into Marathi sources to explore how one tradition in western India worked out the relationship between bhakti and caste on its own terms. Food and eating together were central to this. As stories about saints and food changed while moving across manuscripts, theatrical plays, and films, the bhakti-caste relationship went from being a strategically ambiguous riddle to a question that expected—and received—answers. Shared Devotion, Shared Food demonstrates the value of critical commensality to understand how people carefully negotiate their ethical ideals with social practices. Food’s capacity to symbolize many things made it made an ideal site for debating bhakti’s implications about caste differences. In the Vārkarī tradition, strategically deployed ambiguity and the resonating of stories across media over time developed an ideology of inclusive difference—not social equality in the modern sense, but an alternative holistic view of society.

(PDF contains a preview of the book from Routledge's website, including the TOC and Introduction.)

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 contributing authors 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, ethic—the 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.

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.

There is a basic tension within the idea of Comparative Hagiology, because the two terms that constitute its name are incongruous. To formulate a comparative hagiological project, we must choose at the outset which term will take priority. Prioritizing the comparative in comparative hagiology orients us to focus more on the basic disciplinary approaches to gather compare-able data, leaving hagiology as a placeholder whose content will be defined by the results of the comparison. Prioritizing hagiology requires first defining hagio-and reckoning with the European and Christian baggage that it brings to cross-cultural and inter-religious comparison. Holding that definition in mind, we then locate examples to compare by whatever approach seems fruitful in that case. Different choices of priorities lead to potentially different results. I argue that a path that prioritizes comparative is more likely to inspire experimental and innovative groupings, unconventional definitions of hagiology, and new perspectives in the cross-cultural study of religion. An approach that prioritizes hagiology runs a greater risk of repeating the same provincial and conceptual biases that doomed much of 20th-century comparative religion scholarship.

Founded in 2014, the RBSN is a virtual community of scholars who work on the diverse regional bhakti traditions of India in their broader historical, socio-political, intellectual, and literary contexts. The main purpose of the group is to provide a platform in which scholars with particular linguistic skills and knowledge bases to share and benefit from each other's expertise. The network helps members enhance their own research by allowing them to post questions to the group and explore interregional patterns and points of connection. It also helps scholars efficiently locate other specialists who share common interests and questions, around which future conference panels and collaborative projects could be designed. Most broadly, the network aims to foster the study of regional bhakti traditions as integral components in the history, religion, and culture of South Asia. This includes a vigorous questioning of the category " bhakti " itself, how it has been constructed, and to what ends it has been deployed.